[HN Gopher] Show HN: DaedalOS - Desktop Environment in the Browser
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Show HN: DaedalOS - Desktop Environment in the Browser
Demo: https://dustinbrett.com Hey HN! I've been building my
passion project daedalOS for over 4 years now. The original idea
was to give visitors to my website the experience as if they had
remotely connected to my personal machine. To do this I decided I
would attempt to recreate as much of the functionality as possible.
My hope is to keep working on this project for the rest of my life
and continue to evolve it's capabilities as technologies progress.
Thanks for checking it out!
Author : DustinBrett
Score : 94 points
Date : 2025-05-25 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Swish.
|
| One thing I found as a minor distraction was that when you go to
| browse a folder the tab title of tab changes to the folder.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Much deeper and works better than anything like it, at least from
| what I've seen around the web. And that's only from my phone.
| Very well done
|
| I even got quake to run, haven't tried connecting a keyboard yet.
| 1bpp wrote:
| This is really impressive and surprisingly visually close to
| Explorer, especially the font rendering and the button hover
| effects. I also started poking around to see how the animated
| wallpaper was done and the custom devtools were a nice surprise
| too. I don't know how much Microsoft cares about people ripping
| Windows icons, but directly using icons from Facebook Messenger,
| VLC, VSCode, Chromium, etc might be more of a concern if it
| starts to get more attention.
| exe34 wrote:
| Very nice! I only managed to nest two browsers, the third one
| didn't seem to be responding - although that might be the hug of
| death.
| nichol4s wrote:
| This is amazing - well done, and indeed runs oh-so smooth - even
| on mobile!
|
| I see that the browser is somewhat limited as most sites try to
| prevent 'embedding'. However, we have a solution where we can
| proxy any web content in such a way to still allow you to embed
| it: https://www.webfuse.com/use-case/embed-unembeddable-content
|
| Lmk if you would like to try this out and I can help you set this
| up.
| koolala wrote:
| It would be EUR529 /month for 20 users but wouldn't they need
| to possibly support way more users than that? I wish we had a
| client-side solution that could infinitely scale beyond having
| users run their own node.js proxy.
| vishnudeva wrote:
| Just magical! It's so realistic that I had to remind myself that
| it was a website and not a VM!
|
| The nuances you've captured across so many different interfaces
| must've taken you a long time!
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Wow, this is an incredibly full featured Win10-like OS using
| plain HTML, with apps like Quake3 and Tic80 built in.
|
| Besides having something you can continuously work on, what's the
| current concrete end goal for it for users?
| _joel wrote:
| Amazing work, well done. Just spent a good chunk of time playing
| Quake
| rfl890 wrote:
| The accuracy and attention to detail in the UI is amazing. You
| even got the little window borders right. Nice work!
| benrutter wrote:
| This is insanely cool! I really want to know how programmes like
| Vim are running under the hood, is this emulation? Either way,
| massive congrats on an awesome fun project.
| Lerc wrote:
| I made one of these years ago, much less polished but broadly
| similar.
|
| From that perspective you have done well to avoid discouragement.
| Most of the feedback I received was negative. Worse was that the
| negative feedback was not related to my implementation but
| arguing that I should not try at all.
|
| If you do keep working on this project for the rest of your life,
| I commend you.
|
| I kind of got split between making a client only version (all
| data client side), a file storage server where all brains are
| client side but persistent data is on a server, or a direct Linux
| login (open real shell on browser. Linux executables can connect
| to a socket to open windows on the browser and provide a UI
| similar to how X11 does, only with a much smarter UI host)
|
| In recent years I have been doing a few experiments working on
| the areas that were difficult. So many things have been added to
| browsers since I started, I can't recall exactly how long ago
| that was but I remember boot2gecko adding features that I needed.
|
| Recently I have been experimenting with launching web workers
| which asks for an API and is given a MessagePort with code to
| construct functions that translate to messages. That way all of
| the desktop features can be provided as permissions with some
| auditing theoretically(but unimplemented) available.
| nichol4s wrote:
| Wow - indeed. I see you made something like this already back
| in 2012. Impressive: https://github.com/Lerc/notanos That is
| more than 13 years ago when websockets where about to become
| generally available. Impressive!
|
| Don't be discouraged by people that argue what you should or
| should not do. The world is full with people with their own
| agenda or that simply have a too narrow view of how their world
| should operate.
| shwouchk wrote:
| amazingly well done. i like it that my browser has a browser so i
| opened the website in the website until there was no room left on
| the screen and it was smooth as silk
| kleiba wrote:
| Does it run Doom?
|
| /ducks
| koolala wrote:
| yes its a shortcut on the desktop
| fimdomeio wrote:
| This is something that was clearly done just by the love of the
| craft and congratulations but also feel this could have a huge
| potential in real world applications.
|
| First crazy idea that came to mind was a multi user desktop
| environment for an intranet where everyone has their own desktop
| but could also request access to other desktops entering and
| leaving them as they are working together through the day.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Impressive. Running smooth on an old 4-core Kaby Lake, in FF,
| while that is playing some music via YT in some other tab. Kaby
| Lake clocks up from 800Mhz to 900, peaking 1.1G sometimes. Music
| doesn't stutter, not even while your video plays.
|
| Though I'd have preferred the option to switch to a light theme.
| mathfailure wrote:
| I don't know why, but just the animated background causes 100%
| cpu consumption for me. Debian 12, Chromium 136, i5-3450, 20gb
| ram, nVidia 3080, 4k screen though.
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