Show HN: Bunny – An Ephemeral Desktop in the Browser

Bunny is a project I've been working on over a few weekends, I initially built it to solve the problem I keep having where I want to test some software / break a computer in some way, but Virtual Machines are a bit unwieldy and take a while to set up.

Bunny gives you a connection to an ephemeral desktop computer, which you have sudo access to (play nice :)), you can test stuff out and throw stuff around in there, and once you're done just close the tab and computer will cease to exist.

There's a few things I still want to do, but I think this is MVP-ish enough to show now:

- You have to pass a reCAPTCHAv3 challenge to use the service, I want to add fallbacks onto v2 and hCaptcha

- I want people to be able to use a specific URL to ask for a specific OS (for example to get a bunny instance on Windows or Mac OSX it would be awesome if you could just navigate to bunny.lucy.sh/windows10 or bunny.lucy.sh/macos-bigsur, etc)

- This doesn't work well on Mobile, I want this to work on Mobile since I've definitely needed a quick desktop PC on some occasions when out and about on my mobile phone.

Behind the scenes, this is using Guacamole http://guacamole.apache.org/ for the heavy lifting, really cool project :D

Any feedback or comments appreciated :)

I imagined having Guacamole spin up a desktop container with a directory mounted into it for the user's homedir. The OS is ephemeral but not the user's data. It would never need to persist like the home directory.

Need a different base OS? Provide other images that could be selected between. Update time? Upgrade the packages in the image and they roll out as people log out.

Resource usage would be lower (than VM VDI setups) because the containers would disappear after they logged out.

I never really got past the idea, but this reminded me.