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