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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if someone will eventually make a desktop OS that is entirely web-based. No GTK or WinUI - everything is a web app. Except that the DE would also be, technically speaking, a web app itself that shows other web apps. Kind of like this, except imagine if the example apps ("File Explorer") were real web apps loading into the web app desktop environment.

I think Firefox OS was the farthest that this got, but I think it has potential. Such an OS would basically just be Linux + Headless Chromium + web browser API abstractions for things like USB (WebUSB), etc.

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This was done in 2005 by eyeOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS

Sadly, too advanced to its time, it was acquired but dismantled some time later.

That’s what I am building, except both native and web apps work seamlessly together: https://www.greenfield.app/ https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield https://twitter.com/FriedChicken/status/1420671685485867014?...

That's what we did at Jolicloud a decade ago to make a better (different? beautiful? doomed?) OS for netbooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joli_OS

The OS booted ASAP to a fullscreen Chromium instance, until we added support for running Linux apps too later on. I didn't work on the windows management so can't say more about this technical side.

How far is ChromeOS / ChromiumOS from what you described?

Not there yet, because ChromeOS's user interface is not written as a web app. (Think close, minimize, maximize, window frame, taskbar, etc.) Same for it's native user interface (Settings menu).

I'm thinking of a desktop environment where everything was truly web - there was no native toolkit.

These (online browser based) desktop environments work best when you hit F11 and go fullscreen, stripping the browser chrome away.

Either the user does that, or we signal to the browser that this is a 'fullscreen only app and you must run it fullscreen' but that would be bad user experience, since most users would struggle to exit it.

Not the same as what you’re talking about, but I recall seeing this a few months back and found it pretty cool: https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

I don't really remember the name now, but gnome/gtk had a way to render the entire interface in a browser, if anyone can remember please let me know

Edit: it is the project the_only_law posted below

There's also the Broadway GTK backend https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/broadway.html

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