General question: Is there an actual use for this kinds of projects, beyond showing what can be done? I have seen many different "web desktop" projects and while most of them were impressive in their own (technical) ways, I could never see the an actual use case for them.
My Synology NAS uses something like this for its navigation and even if it's initially strange, you instantly miss it when you access it from your phone, when the UI turns into this nested list which is not intuitive at all
I personally hate this from Synology. While their apps are meaningful structured and look good, it is just a natural mismatch to put sub windows into a parent window. Anyone remembering multi sub window apps in the Microsoft office suite in the 90s/00s. Was also horrible without a browser/html involved.
StarOffice (precursor to LibreOffice) used to take this one step further and replicated the taskbar and start menu inside the application window: https://winworldpc.com/product/staroffice/5x
Yes, and from day one Opera (when it was still called Multitorg) used it to give us something like "tabbed browsing". I think that was in the mid-1990s ;)
Yeah, same. I have a synology NAS and the desktop-of-windows-in-a-window aspect of it just seems archaic to me. I have a browser with tabs, thanks. If I really need two things going, I'll open two tabs or two browser windows.
I also like the Synology UI. It is helpful to see multiple apps at the same time and is especially useful when moving files around to have two or more file browser windows open.
We talk about have consistent desktop experience everywhere. This provides exactly that. Your desktop is everywhere you go.
What sucks is, you need a whole browser for it. What sucks is, I think that's the only way to do it. A full on VM to make it real.
I would use this if the browser stack had more promise of not changing for 50 years and not owned by Google. Unfortunately our last place of freedom is native execution.
Personally I can see myself using this to access my homelab from work without having to open extra ports. Since I can't install a personal VPN client on my work machine, a web-based desktop behind a login would give me most of what I want.
Guacamole was actually my first choice and it's what I used a year ago. In that time span I've screwed up enough that my lab actually needs a whole rebuild, so I'm looking at alternatives to see what could be swapped over. As it is, I think Guacamole remains my first choice. I was just responding to the question of what this could be used for.
As someone who has spent years working on one of these, that is a very interesting question. I do it as a passion/side project so it's not as important to me, but I also like to think of it like the "Field of Dreams" philosophy of "If You Build It, They Will Come". I hope one day if I add enough features and interconnect enough things, the applicability will show itself.
I'd use this to store files on an encrypted Digital Ocean droplet, better than fiddling around with Nextcloud. I treat cloud storage as a USB stick; file management is 100% manual, no sync.
