About two months ago I have posted here an article on a project of mine called "web-desktop-environment", if you're interested in the idea of a web-based desktop environment you can read about it here

A web-based desktop environment
shmuelhizmi ・ Jul 17 '20 ・ 2 min read
in this post I'm going to share the progress I have made since I first posted the article
A brief introduction to the project 👩🏫
"web-desktop-environment" is a desktop-environment (a visual interface for a computer) that can run in a web browser over a NodeJS server, the advantages of "web-desktop-environment" over a regular desktop-environment is that it is much slimmer and portable compare to a regular desktop.
Use cases
- interface for a cloud server (can possibly be used as a replacement for control panel)
- interface for small/low power computers like the Raspberry Pi zero
- interface for controlling your computer over a long distance
A demo video 📹
A live demo 🖥
There is a live demo (serverless) running here
PWA Screenshot 🎞
This is a screenshot of the app running as a PWA in a detachable windows mode
Upcoming features 🎆
Media Players apps are on their way
Looking to build a full-stack app that pushes the web to its limits yourself?
if so you may be interested in the framework I build and used to build this project, the framework is "@react-fullstack/fullstack" and you can read more about it here

React-Fullstack - A new React framework for building React Full-Stack applications
shmuelhizmi ・ Sep 4 '20 ・ 4 min read
shmuelhizmi
/
react-fullstack
a set of packages for creating full-stack React applications
React Fullstack
"React Fullstack" is collection of libraries for creating fullstack applications that are based on React!
"React Fullstack" main packages are
-
Fullstack or
npm i @react-fullstack/fullstack
-
express server
npm i @react-fullstack/server-express
All my progress since the first post 🥳
Since the last update, I have made a few new features and improvement
- Resizeable windows - you can now resize windows.
- Notepad - a notepad app.
- PWA - the app can now also run as Progressive Web App.
- Detachable windows mode - you can now run the desktop in a detachable windows mode which means that every window will open as a separate native window.
- style changes - the app is currently moving thought a big style redo, to give it a more "native os" like style.
- big speed improvement from moving the backend from reflow to my own framework "@react-fullstack/fullstack"
- custom themes - create your own theme using the settings app
Contribute yourself 🎁
if you like the project and interested in contributing to it yourself - feel free to open a PR thought Github.
Note that contribution does not have to be in the code side of things, contributing to the project README would be awesome!
Checkout the project 🎮
shmuelhizmi
/
web-desktop-environment
a web/node-based cross-platform desktop environment
A cross-platform desktop-environment with a web interface
Installation and run guide
First, we need to make sure we have node and npm installed, I recommend using node 14.x with npm 7.x.
now we will install "web-desktop-environment" with the following commands -
npm install @web-desktop-environment/home-edition-server
or npm install @web-desktop-environment/development-edition-server --unsafe-perm
for the development edition of "web-desktop-environment".
After the "web-desktop-environment" server is installed we can run it using
the command web-desktop-home
or web-desktop-dev
for the development edition of "web-desktop-environment".
Now that "web-desktop-environment" is running we can enter "https://web-desktop-environment.vercel.app" and connect to it.
to connect to the server we will need to enter the server host and port,
if we are running the server locally we can keep the default localhost
host, otherwise enter the server host IP,
to get the server port we can look at the server console output, it should print somewhere in the start something along the…
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