Hacker News Reader

Comment by antpls | Hacker News Reader

What i am looking for is a distro where the only UI is through webpages.

I had idea about installing a local Prometheus agent, cockpit and other modern administration tools, but it could'nt match all the features of Gnome 3. Especially, I couldn't find a webtool to manage hardware, such as Wifi, keyboard configuration, display, mouse, etc. Also, a very good, fast, and stable web terminal isnt easy to find

View on HN

As someone who works in computer graphics this idea makes me sad. I mean I know web is the closest thing we have to a universal interface, and there are a ton of advantages to it, but the idea of moving more toward a world where every single thing you do on a computer has this thick layer of web technologies between the user and the hardware is just depressing. Like why should AMD and Intel even bother innovating if everything is going to be bottlenecked by single-threaded Javascript?

Once wasm is commonplace, this might not be that bad actually.

Wasm is a step in the right direction, but it's not the same as machine code. Also the API's currently pretty limited. For instance, if you want to talk to the GPU you still have to go through javascript.

It depends on your use case. In my case, most of the ram of my computer is already dedicated to a web browser anyway. I prefer to have everything done in the web browser rather than having another complex graphic framework running in parallel. Plus HTML is highly hackable and there is no reason we cannot reuse the many tools developed for monitoring remote servers on a local machine.

I like the idea of Google Chrome OS, but I would like to be free to chose the web browser I want.

> In my case, most of the ram of my computer is already dedicated to a web browser anyway

To me that's an argument for why you'd want to do less in the browser, not more.

> I prefer to have everything done in the web browser rather than having another complex graphic framework running in parallel.

Do you have any technical reason you want that? Because a terminal interface, for example, is going to be much more efficient in terms of resource usage if it's implemented natively rather than in a webview.

Have you thought about using tools like http://www.webmin.com/ or https://cockpit-project.org/ ? They are thought for managing servers, but they might also work for desktops. Also I wouldn't be surprised if tools like http://yast.opensuse.org/ offered a web GUI.

Furthermore, for a web based terminal, thanks to https://xtermjs.org/, terminal.js and friends, there are plenty of products available nowadays. Maybe this helps for starting a web search.

I tried cockpit and liked the UI. It's modern, simple and clean. However the features were limited (disk space, CPU graphs, but no management for wifi).

I aslo tried ajenti.org but same issue, I couldn't even manage wifi with it.

I will maybe make something myself. Maybe something that can take any linux tools in input and make a primitive web interface for it as output automatically.

These tools don't offer to manage wifi because they are intended for managing servers. However, most of them follow some module paradigm, so if you are open to start coding, you could implement a wifi module. Which cannot be that hard, given that there are also modular (UI independent) codes for network managing, such as https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/NetworkManager

Of course, similar as to when configuring a router, don't lock out yourself from the wifi-connected machine ;-)

This is actually a decent idea as it would make spotting webshite-obsessed hipsters even easier.

This isn't a particularly practical suggestion, but you might be interested in the Nintendo ES operating system.

EDIT: Maybe XPenology can run the DSM web interface on a desktop OS?

EDIT 2: Most of KDE Plasma (well, the QML parts at least) will probably run through the WebGL streaming QPA. Likewise using Broadway for Gnome GTK3 apps.

Thank you for the pointers!

If at some point we can run classical Gnome apps in the Browser, I guess it could be a solution. I would prefer to have only one "way" of presenting information, based on web standards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com