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Show HN: DaedalOS – Desktop Environment in the Browser

by DustinBrett on 5/25/25, 4:06 PM with 79 comments

• by Lerc on 5/25/25, 8:25 PM

  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.

• by nichol4s on 5/25/25, 7:08 PM

  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.

• by tamat on 5/26/25, 7:41 AM

  On one side Im amazed by the amount of good work you have done, but on the other, I feel it lacks true useful scenarios.

  For instance, I would love to install it in my server to handle my own server files, but it doesnt support mounting a folder to access from the OS.

  Or I would love to have an SSH client, or a terminal that is executed in the server, to run my own nodejs apps.

  Also some form of login/pass would be helpfull in case somebody got access to the URL.

  But none of them are available.

  I understand than the goal was to see whats possible in a browser, but to make it more appealing to people I would love to see some real usecases covered.

  Cheers

• by wkat4242 on 5/25/25, 11:39 PM

  Reminds me a bit of Sun's network computer (JavaStation) back in the day. Based on JavaOS. It was an idea to get Java on the map but it had very obvious issues.

  The main thing I remember about that... s...l...o...w... :P The other thing I remember: Shit cool hardware. As expected from Sun. They were the cool kids before Apple were cool, along with SGI.

  But of course computers are not what they used to be these days.

• by 1bpp on 5/25/25, 6:50 PM

  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.

• by jeffhuys on 5/25/25, 6:47 PM

  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.

• by vishnudeva on 5/25/25, 7:21 PM

  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!

• by rfl890 on 5/25/25, 7:45 PM

  The accuracy and attention to detail in the UI is amazing. You even got the little window borders right. Nice work!

• by benrutter on 5/25/25, 7:57 PM

  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.

• by fimdomeio on 5/25/25, 8:58 PM

  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.

• by Jean-Philipe on 5/26/25, 7:44 AM

  I really appreciate that the double-click on the icon button in the title bar of each window closes it. Such a nice detail! I got used to this once on windows 3.11 and Windows kept behaving like that through the versions, even though there's a dedicated close button on the right. I think the most recent versions of windows don't have this behavior anymore.

• by LargoLasskhyfv on 5/25/25, 9:26 PM

  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.

• by nunobrito on 5/26/25, 12:37 PM

  Hey, extra nice to see NOSTR supported there by default.

  How about running Linux there: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=alpine-x86.cfg&mem=1...

• by nosmokewhereiam on 5/26/25, 1:10 AM

  I had a conversation on an irc room I created called #globaltetrahedron using two browser windows on my $40 cracked screen phone.

  Worked flawlessly and is a fantastic experience. I hope Microsoft is scared of the efficiency of your experience.

• by 90s_dev on 5/25/25, 7:36 PM

  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?

• by benoau on 5/25/25, 11:29 PM

  This looks awesome. As soon as I saw Synology's DSM I realized the browser would be a fantastic place for a desktop environment, but they only built half of it - then left it mostly untouched anyway.

• by webprofusion on 5/26/25, 3:54 AM

  Inspired me to post my 30 year old DOS guitar tool as a web app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093764

• by alexpadula on 5/26/25, 2:55 PM

  Really cool! I've seen this before, really good work. I saw your awesome YouTube video's explaining what you've done.

• by hxorr on 5/26/25, 5:31 AM

  I checked out a lot of browser desktop environments before embarking on my own project, this one definitely takes the cake

• by AstroJetson on 5/26/25, 10:38 AM

  It's very cool. Love the Winamp and Doom throwbacks, it was fun to play Doom for a little bit.

  Congrats on the Webby nomination!

• by _joel on 5/25/25, 7:37 PM

  Amazing work, well done. Just spent a good chunk of time playing Quake

• by alok-g on 5/26/25, 9:35 AM

  Can someone explain to me why would such things be useful?

  PS: I do not want the next generation of apps to be running only on top of these. We already have layers on top of layers in software.

• by chamomeal on 5/25/25, 11:50 PM

  I saw this a few years ago, and it’s still at the top of my “cool shit” bookmarks!!

  I still look at it when I want to remember how fun, cool and silly programming can be. I seriously love this project.

• by mathfailure on 5/25/25, 10:16 PM

  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.

• by exe34 on 5/25/25, 7:00 PM

  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.

• by doublerabbit on 5/25/25, 6:25 PM

  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.

• by bitwize on 5/26/25, 11:08 AM

  It's perfectly useless. I don't see the practicality of something like this at all.

  ...I love it.

• by shwouchk on 5/25/25, 8:26 PM

  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

• by rollcat on 5/26/25, 12:05 PM

  Holy heck. Exploring this uncovers so many little gems.

  - Winamp. With skins.

  - SWFs. Badger.

  - A bunch bootable ISOs with OSs like Kolibri. Kinda nuts to have a real OS in a browser OS on a real OS. Also: Windows RG.

  - Web-self-inspector. <https://malleable.systems/> anyone?

  - Games. Doom. Keen 4. Quake 3. What the heck- Quake 3!?

• by julius-fx on 5/26/25, 9:01 AM

  It feels so good using it. Amazing work!

• by kleiba on 5/25/25, 8:39 PM

  Does it run Doom?

  /ducks

• by patrick4urcloud on 5/26/25, 12:38 PM

  incredible !