Show HN: 3 years and 1M users later, I just open-sourced my "Internet OS"

So… Somebody submitted Half Life&#x2F;Xash3D as a Puter app:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puter.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;half-life-c3j01ag3pyd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puter.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;half-life-c3j01ag3pyd</a><p>It looks like it&#x27;s using a build of the below, hosted on GitHub.io:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Pixelsuft&#x2F;hl">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Pixelsuft&#x2F;hl</a>

The circle is finally complete! Now of course you want to use a browser within puter as well: Browser in browser OS in OS in virtual machine...<p>It&#x27;s mind boggling how far one can torture the concept of markup documents to eventually arrive at something like this... just so users don&#x27;t have to install software.

To me, Puter platform has a huge potential. And as a developer, I already have large value from it.<p>Using puter.js I was able to add full cloud storage for my design editor <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;studio.polotno.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;studio.polotno.com&#x2F;</a> without messing up with auth, backend and databases.

This is insanely cool! Looks really slick too, even in a mobile screen.<p>jQuery?? I cannot imagine how difficult it is to not break this when you make the slightest change, hats off for managing with vanilla Javascript and jQuery! The best thing about React for me is to not have to worry about breaking the DOM or messing up with event handlers because some jQuery line, somewhere obscure is probably doing something funky that is really difficult to track down!

I got carried away for ages with this. I was installing extensions in VSCode and got confused when it wouldn&#x27;t open a link to a repo in a little browserception, because by that point I was fully expecting it to.<p>Really nicely done.

Love it!<p>It would be nice if `~` was mapped to home directory (e.g. `cd ~&#x2F;Desktop`)<p>Hard to resize windows. If I want to grab the right edge there is only 1 pixel to work with.<p>When printing with `cat` from terminal, it would be nice if there was a new line at the end of the text. The prompt shows up on the same line as cat&#x27;s output.<p>Copy-paste from clipboard into puter instance.<p>How do I get python on here?

It&#x27;s all fun and games until we reflexively hit ctrl-w to close a virtual window and end up closing the browser tab that window is running in :&#x2F;.

When I was young I dreamed on having a USB stick (not yet invented) I could take with me to different kiosks and have a standard OS load my specific instances thanks to my custom key. This approaches that functionality and I think it&#x27;s pure brilliance that you&#x27;ve included such thorough a demo for us to enjoy that you spent so much time and enthusiastic effort into creating and making manifest. So, I applaud you there and thank you for making it open-source that&#x27;s super cool, and might inspire someone to make a kiosk that, by default, loads your site.

The docs say a this can be used for remote access to servers and workstations.<p>How does it handle things like privilege escalation and sandboxing?<p>I&#x27;m assuming you mean remote access for a user account like a terminal server as opposed to server management.<p>Is that the case?

Beautiful execution! Though I&#x27;m crestfallen it has no Browser app with which to view an inception of Puter within.

I just want to point out how clean and pleasant to read this codebase is. I&#x27;m starting to learn JavaScript, coming from a background of systems programming, and I bookmarked this codebase just as a benchmark example of what good JS code looks like.

This is really cool--I&#x27;ve played with a lot of these online desktops, but this is by far the slickest.<p>As someone who is doing something similar (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridwhale.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gridwhale.com</a>), I&#x27;d love to know what your goals were. Did you ever try to commercialize it? If not, why not? If yes, what happened?

Inside the OS, there&#x27;s a game called Danger Cross, which seems very similar to crossy roads. Did the Puter developer essentially reimplement crossy road? Or was there some open source version already existing could somehow run on this &quot;OS&quot; ? Briefly searching google for Danger Cross didn&#x27;t yield any results.

This reminds me of Kera Desktop [1]. Featured on HN 8 months ago, 343 points, 111 comments [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;desktop.kerahq.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;desktop.kerahq.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36260589">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36260589</a>

This is such a neat idea, and you get the gist of it from just the screenshot. I wonder what kinds of &#x27;integration&#x27; you could do (clipboard, opening links, drag-and-drop, etc). I could see this as an educational tool for doing development on a Chromebook, because of the (emulated) terminal + filesystem.

I love how this is done with jQuery. And it&#x27;ll be obvious to literally anyone whose ever used jQuery (and is a good designer) how perfectly suitable and in many ways superior jQuery would be for something like this. But 98% of developers will absolutely balk at this in horror&#x2F;confusion&#x2F;wonder, despite the fact that the React&#x2F;Angular DIYs they&#x27;d make would be bloated and outrageously slow.

The experience of making and publishing websites and apps from within puter is sobering for how simple it is. Something to aspire to

If anyone was in doubt; jQuery is not dead. For anyone who wants to write minimalistic and efficient vanilla javascript, jQuery is still being maintained and used by many.

Dec 2022 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33838179">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33838179</a>

I&#x27;ve been looking an OS for a VR computer (i.e. simulated but functional workstation). This should work very well :)

One of the things I find curious here is that there&#x27;s no mobile story to speak of. Drag the window narrow, and all that happens is that the taskbar icons look squished.<p>Is there a mobile mode coming?<p>This would be dope af if I could get a mobile-esque UI on mobile-like devices, or opt into one on tablet-like devices.<p>In all honesty, this is perfect for people like me (who are rarely away from a keyboard) but less than ideal for people who live a more 21st century computing lifestyle.<p>If this thing had a mobile mode it would be revolutionary.<p>As it stands, it&#x27;s still definitely revolution-friendly :)

This is one of the cool elements of the Synology operating system. Would be neat to see this extended further into other areas, using this as a base.<p>I setup a TrueNAS box for my dad recently and he was yearning for some kind of very light desktop environment for simple maintenance tasks. In hindsight I should have gotten him a Synology device.

Love it! I liked the Solitaire implementation. The terminal seems very lacking, &quot;ls&quot; worked but e.g. &quot;ls *&quot; or the &quot;find&quot; command didn&#x27;t work.

We also do a desktop in a browser, but some core differences are you can launch real browsers in our environment and essentially load any web-based app you want collaboratively. It also does screen sharing and has A&#x2F;V for meetings (we are not open source though, and have a paid product):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.switchboard.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.switchboard.app&#x2F;</a><p>Knowing how difficult it is to build something like this, Puter definitely deserves praise.

I think this is brilliant, amazing work, opened on mobile Firefox with ublock advanced enabled; everything works first party. Most modern text based websites can&#x27;t do that!<p>That being said I thought initially this would compete with ChromeOS, of the ill-fated Firefox OS; however, all other comments and FAQ are on about other things.<p>So brilliant, but I don&#x27;t get it.

I tried running it locally and connecting to it with Firefox but it just gives me a log in dialog and trying to create an account fails. With Vivaldi creating an account works.<p>But where is this account created? Ah,just got an email that includes a link to puter.com so this created an account on a remote server. So it&#x27;s not quite as local as advertised.

I still don&#x27;t get the appeal. Why would you want this again?

Two places where the project is very impressive:<p>1. Emulating a desktop with windows so smoothly on both desktop and mobile. This webapp is much snappier than most webapps these days.<p>2. A storage and file explorer with a friendly API for third party apps. Now any app can use a cloud storage synced across devices where the storage costs are paid by the user.<p>Can&#x27;t wait until more apps are available! I see some limitations like VS Code unable to open git repositories which seems a limitation of the storage API (append-only, cannot seek or download partially)? Hope it gets closer to native experience in the future

What is this used for?

Looks very cool. Am I correct that this is more like a client and that the persistence (user storage, sessions, etc) is handled by the proprietary non-open source cloud backend? Not a criticism, just trying to understand.

Really nice execution! Thanks for sharing

Curious how AGPL would apply for something like this. This seems like a tool to put a nice front end on a complex app, but would that trigger copyleft for the the overall backend?

You used the AGPL! Glorious! I commend and salute your efforts. Thank you for your contribution!

First thing I tried was checking if I could use it to share images. Which would be a nice way to organize what I share in folders. But apparently it can only be opened inside Puter itself, and it asks the user if they want to download it.

In case you wonder about the purpose of the project like I did, here&#x27;s the explanation in README:<p>&gt; It can be used to build remote desktop environments or serve as an interface for cloud storage services, remote servers, web hosting platforms, and more.

Interesting to see that it&#x27;s written more &quot;low level&quot;: vanilla JS and jQuery (nostalgia kicks in). I guess it&#x27;s analogous to why linux&#x2F;windows kernels are still written in C language.

Looks awesome. I&#x27;m thinking about building a niche CMS soon, could this be an interface to it? Mentions cloud applications.<p>Seems like it might confuse normal folks though—a desktop in a browser. What do y&#x27;all think?

Impressive and reminded of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Java_Desktop_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Java_Desktop_System</a>

jQuery? :D<p>it&#x27;s true, coding was easy with jQuery ...

Here&#x27;s my &quot;contribution&quot;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puter.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;browser-n70yre8kj1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puter.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;browser-n70yre8kj1</a>

What’s the “publish as website” thingy&#x2F;functionality all about?

Super slick!<p>What are some common applications for this, though? I can&#x27;t think of a reason I&#x27;d want to access this versus, say, a remote vm?

Anybody remembers the original (not Apple) iCloud web desktop?<p>Or EyeOS?

Great to see you finally got it open sourced, congrats!

Possible to write our own window manager? I guess just diving into the code, but that would make it very hackable of course. And fun.

Are you the MS guy with a YouTube channel who&#x27;s website is basically this? Can&#x27;t recall the channel right now though.

Congrats on getting this out there. Looks slick. I’ll take a look tomorrow when I’m back at a computer with a larger screen.

It has an interesting similarity with IBM&#x27;s ZOWE web UI. Is there any commonality in the building blocks?

I just wanted to say well done. I wish other eco systems were this open, hackable and understandable.

Love it!! I own the domain internet.inc that would be perfect for this - want to use it??

I&#x27;ve spent whole yesterday evening for finding something like this. Great work!

Been looking for something like this for use with a VR headset for coding.

Not to detract from the coolness of this, but I wish new OSes dabbled in new GUIs as well.<p>Experimental operating systems seem to be dime a dozen by now, but we almost never see experimental GUIs or entirely new &quot;desktop environments&quot;.<p>Just as how almost every &quot;new&quot; programming language is still stuck with semicolons and other C-isms that were ancient back when the Egyptians were laying down the pyramids, we&#x27;re still stuck with either imitating the macOS GUI or the Windows GUI, or some weird Frankenstein&#x27;s bastard of the two.<p>iOS, Android, consoles, and most recently the Vision Pro have proven that eschewing longstanding conventions can be successful — for example the vast majority of people on this planet don&#x27;t need or care about scrollbars (or even menubars) anymore.<p>So why aren&#x27;t the creators of experimental OSes being more experimental with the frontend? Come on guys, none but the nerds among us will be impressed with how it&#x27;s made behind the scenes. The first impression that most people will get is that&#x27;s just Yet Another WinMac-Looklike.

&quot;Puter is built with vanilla JavaScript and jQuery&quot;<p>respect.

Thanks for this, OP. This is why I come here.

I used it, I loved it!<p>But why would someone use it?

Pretty slick

Beautiful work. Much appreciated

Make JQuery great again

is this basically a VM (w gui) running on the browser?

Very cool, LFG!!!!!!

Does globbing not work in the shell?<p>I made (touched) a bunch of shit* files in ~&#x2F;Desktop to amuse myself, which I guess is fine.<p>And then I made a few shit* files in ~, which should also be fine.<p>But when I try to mv my new shit* to ~&#x2F;Desktop, it fails.<p>(ls shit* in ~ also fails.)

This is soo freaking amazing !! What a legend

how can I pip install on this?

That warms my heart:<p>“ - Why isn&#x27;t Puter built with React, Angular, Vue, etc.?<p>For performance reasons, Puter is built with vanilla JavaScript and jQuery. Additionally, we&#x27;d like to avoid complex abstractions and to remain in control of the entire stack, as much as possible.<p>Also partly inspired by some of our favorite projects that are not built with frameworks: VSCode, Photopea, and OnlyOffice.<p>- Why jQuery?<p>Puter interacts directly with the DOM and jQuery provides an elegant yet powerful API to manipulate the DOM, handle events, and much more. It&#x27;s also fast, mature, and battle-tested.”

Super slick demo, I&#x27;m on mobile and it&#x27;s impressively <i>fast</i> nevermind functional.<p>But it is &#x27;just&#x27; a DE webapp right? From &#x27;internet OS&#x27; here (which actually I don&#x27;t think you use at TFA repo) I expected to be able to boot to it. I guess there is some other solution that would allow that, but not a package deal?<p>I suppose I&#x27;m just saying be careful&#x2F;manage expectations with &#x27;OS&#x27;, but for what it actually is it&#x27;s really cool.

This looks amazing. Also;<p>&gt; Why isn&#x27;t Puter built with React, Angular, Vue, etc.?<p>&gt; For performance reasons, Puter is built with vanilla JavaScript and jQuery. Additionally, we&#x27;d like to avoid complex abstractions and to remain in control of the entire stack, as much as possible.<p>Absolute boss level.

Ah, Puter! That fascinating project surfaced on HN about a year ago, claiming the top spot for most of the day. I&#x27;m delighted to witness its transition to open source, allowing us to glean insights from the creator. Gracias for sharing!<p>The emergence of such front-end projects provides a profound glimpse into the maturation of front-end development and showcasing the incredible possibilities it offers today.<p>Another really cool project, somehow related, is DaedalOS [2].<p>Honorable mention, Windows 11 in Svelte [3]<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33838179">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33838179</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38830132">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38830132</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29779753">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29779753</a><p>3.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35896505">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35896505</a>

I hate that these guys have to justify using jQuery. Too many of you have been seduced by all these bullshit javascript stacks that just add a seemingly infinite amount of complexity to something that is already almost too complicated.

Why is this so easy to read compared to React? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;HeyPuter&#x2F;puter&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;UI&#x2F;PuterDialog.js">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;HeyPuter&#x2F;puter&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;UI&#x2F;PuterDi...</a>

More web desktops: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simone.computer&#x2F;#&#x2F;webdesktops" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simone.computer&#x2F;#&#x2F;webdesktops</a><p>Note that most of these are aesthetic &#x2F; non-CRUD.

&gt; For performance reasons, Puter is built with vanilla JavaScript and jQuery.<p>jQuery is overdue for a comeback.

A slightly unfortunate name for Spanish speakers, I&#x27;m afraid: &quot;putero&quot; can mean either &quot;brothel&quot; or &quot;man who maintains sexual relations with prostitutes&quot; [1].<p>Fun fact: the Mitsubishi Pajero had to be marketed as Montero in Spanish speaking markets as &quot;pajero&quot; is Spanish for &quot;wanker&quot; [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dle.rae.es&#x2F;putero" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dle.rae.es&#x2F;putero</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dle.rae.es&#x2F;pajero" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dle.rae.es&#x2F;pajero</a>