AaronOS | Hacker News Reader

AaronOS

aaronos.dev

138 pointsluke2m26 comments

I love 'web-desktops' so made a comprehensive github repo listing 171 such webDesktops that people made. AaronOS is a part of it wit proper attribution to original creator.

Please have a look here, you will love it : https://github.com/zriyans/awesome-OS

Also: http://www.virtualdesktop.org/

That’s a really cool collection.

I love collections like these. So cool to see what different people have done with the concept.

Novice/young programmers seem to love making OS mockups as a first exercise. This phenomenon even predates web apps: I remember an entire scene consisting of MS-DOS GUIs made with QuickBasic. Hundreds of them - many clones of Windows 95 or Mac OS. There's a site that hosts a bunch of them still: http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/

That's exactly how aOS started. Wasn't quite my first exercise, but was among the first few things I ever made.

I have a little snapshot of how it looked back then, at https://aaronos.dev/AaronOS_Old/

I remember someone making one for an MS-DOS text mode game creation system called MegaZeux. They called it Airborne OS. It was spawned by the enthusiasm around Windows 95/98 at the time, though the result is rather wonky, especially if you're not used to how MegaZeux games typically operate. For example, the cursor is actually the player character and can only move with the arrow keys.

1999 version: https://www.digitalmzx.com/show.php?id=12

2000 version: https://www.digitalmzx.com/show.php?id=13

How cool to see my project on here!

Been working on it for roundabout seven years.

If anyone's got questions, fire away!

Looks amazing!

No question, just a typo I spotted:

    s/psuedo/pseudo

Fixed!

I tried eyeOS long time ago. A plan I never put forward was to use it as a UI to remotely control some device or give access to a few resources of the computer it was running on. Now that tor allows me to give a "universal" name for a machine, maybe I'll think again about doing that.

EyeOS was developed around 15 years ago, when the internet enviroment was on the beginning of web2.0, so things were so different... Now, nearly all of those every day use programs have some sort of web application release or equivalent.

It's something like WindowsCE who tried to move the workings of the desktop to the mobile instead of a fresh interpretation of the platform like Android did at their time.

Looks better & feels snappier than w11(which granted is a low bar).Not usually a fan of such web-based projects but this looks good, and it's not a full-on replica so points for originality aswell.

Web desktops usually aren't meant to be a true replacement of an actual OS. They tend to be long-tailed exercises that marry web development and desktop development.

Thank you for the compliments!

Snappiness is definitely lent to the tiny scale of the project compared to Windows -- the entire thing is loaded to RAM! Though that's been changing in more recent updates.

Looks nice, especially in the full screen mode. Not sure what this is for though. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Mostly fun and entertainment.

Browsers are resource hogs, and they mostly used to run antiquated JavaScript. Creating a responsive, nice-looking "OS" desktop in a browser is something akin to code golf. It's a demonstration of skill at least.

This is my first intro into such a thing - pretty cool...now how do I hack the kernel? LOL

It's open source -- feel free to clone from github and hack away!

Not quite sure that anything could be called a Kernel by any measure, but there's certainly a lot of stuff in there.

Oh, and I apologize in advance for your loss of brain cells. Some of that code is around seven years old.

The other comment is pretty much right on. It's a playground of sorts for me. Platform for the rest of my projects.

Love the look. Would love if this was an installable OS :D

I've experimented with running Chrome in Kiosk mode on system boot before, but it was never very convincing on the old systems I tested on.

Aside that, an Electron app has been experimented with, but only the Music Player has actually been released standalone.

I like how the window controls spell "VOX"

Absolutely love it when people who don't know the difference between OS, DE and a shell start writing "OS"s :D

Otherwise it is quite impressive given the circumstances.

Haha, I experimented with a rebranding to aDE instead of aOS, but felt that it could get confused with actual Linux desktop environments.

As time passes the "System" part of "OS" is beginning to feel more valid, at the least. 3rd-party app support, interconnected systems, etc.

You're right though, certainly not an actual OS by any measure.

Excellent reply to an obvious troll.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com