Are you always a grinch? This is a cool thing to post on Hacker News. I, for one, am impressed it works as well on iOS Safari. It’s just fun.
It deserves scrutiny. If I was making a business out of this (which they are), what I’m saying can only improve their product.
I've seen instances of fun things like "Windows 98 in a browser" that were interesting projects. This seems to be someone trying to make a full-on product out of the concept, even referring to it as "cloud computing" on their Twitter account.
They can't play both sides. It's either a fun little toy, or it's a serious product. "Puter" seems to be aiming for the latter, so they deserve the relevant scrutiny.
- dualboot (not doing that again, Windows 10 loved to eat my bootloader over and over and would get stuck in update loops)
- wine, which requires a lot of configuration and has weird bugs, but is really good for more heavyweight apps (foobar2000 is still king)
- virtualization, which also requires a lot of configuration. need to perform a full OS install, etc. I haven't found a way to easily spin up a virtualized windows box (I run Manjaro = Arch, let me know if you have an easy way. A while back I gave it a couple hours and couldn't figure it out, so I gave up.).
A Windows-in-browser that runs "well enough" and can access my local filesystem would let me just run the damn app, do the thing I want to do, and then call it a day. Of course, I'm sure there's lots of details I haven't thought through here. But it feels like a potentially legitimate use case.