sunset

daedalOS – desktop environment in the web browser

A desktop environment is a collection of disparate components that integrate together. They bundle these components to provide a common graphical user interface with elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. Additionally, most desktop environments include a set of integrated applications and utilities.

Desktop environments provide their own window manager, system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system. They also provide a file manager which organizes, lists, and locates files and directories. Other aspects include a background provider, a panel to provide a menu and display information, as well as a setting/configuration manager to customize the environment.

daedalOS takes a different approach to the traditional desktop environment such as GNOME and KDE. The aim of the daedalOS project is to make a web-based desktop environment that’s suitable for everyday use. It’s written in JavaScript.

Getting Started

We are going to run the software using yarn, a package manager that doubles down as project manager. You can also use a Docker image.

A fresh installation of Ubuntu 21.10 is missing yarn. We use npm to install yarn. npm is a package manager for JavaScript. npm is also not pre-installed with Ubuntu. Let’s therefore first install npm with the command:

$ sudo apt install npm

This command installs a whopping 193 packages.

We can now proceed and install yarn:

$ sudo npm install --global yarn

The next step is to clone the project’s repository and change into the project’s directory with the commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS.git
$ cd daedalOS

Now we can run our own copy of the desktop with the commands:

$ yarn && yarn build:fs && yarn dev

Output will include the line: ready – started server on 0.0.0.0:3000, url: http://localhost:3000

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation / Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Getting Started
Page 2 – In Operation / Summary

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Please read our FAQ before making a comment.

2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Matt
Matt
2 years ago

A desktop in JavaScript, quite interesting

Adrian
Adrian
2 years ago

This reminds me of an ancient project put out by a now-defunct company (Rocklyte) called Athene. It used a custom engine to power a GUI whose interface (and all programs for it) was written in a custom language based off of XML. The goal was to create an OS-independent operating environment, with “desktops” available for Linux and Windows. It didn’t succeed even though the project was cool as cucumbers. I ran the actual commercial Linux distro on a desktop and laptop since the desktop interfaces were so much faster than KDE or Gnome at the time.