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With how much stuff is moving to Electron and how many extensions to the web (like WebUSB and WebGPU) there are, I wonder if in the future, everything will run
by gjsman-1000 3y ago
With how much stuff is moving to Electron and how many extensions to the web (like WebUSB and WebGPU) there are, I wonder if in the future, everything will run via WASM and extensions to WASM. You’ll have the Linux kernel, but only as a driver framework to allow for a completely clean, completely web-based OS on top of it.
Chrome OS is close, but it still has many native bits and pieces (window chrome, taskbar, etc.) I’m talking about going all the way.
- baudaux 3y agoexaequOS is a full system, a kernel with drivers and apps. You can execute several apps in parallel
- solardev 3y agoI think they address some different use cases. Electron makes cross platform frontends easier (at least across desktop OSes and web), but it doesn't really address typical OS-level concerns. Most web apps don't need to go that low, they just deal with the UI and business logic. Where they need higher performance, they can also spin off individual worker threads (in WASM or JS) for compute work, without touching the OS. Maybe high-performance web gaming? Or hardware dependent encoding etc.? But otherwise, I think the typical web app would benefit from a shared UI framework... which is different from a shared OS. You can have one without the other, kinda like how MUI (the Material React UI kit) runs on any browser and doesn't care about the OS, while Linux runs everywhere too but never looks the same on any two machines.