There is KASM VNC, which easily allows to run whole Desktops or single Applications through your Web browser.

I think they use NoVNC or something. There is support for single Wayland applications, but I dont know currently how good it is and its a bit bloated for this specific use case.

Idea: Firefox and Thunderbird use Web Technology to display, dont they? The Browser is completely configurable with CSS. If there is something missing please add.

So you wouldnt need a traditional system and an X server / wayland compositor, but your browser could handle the compositing?

You would then need additional stuff

  • shared storage for downloads
  • redirecting local downloads to your browser, like KASM does it
  • login interface to access the “website”
  • some form of multi-user access, not sure if this is supported at all.

Why? Office 365 has this with Outlook, and Outlook is nowadays a Webapp afaik, just running locally.

It is useful to access

  • a secure browser
  • a configured mail app with many accounts, good interface, calendar, contacts, PGP, etc.
  • you can use thunderbird from Tablets
  • You can have an isolated Browser

This may be duplicating KASMs effords, but I think it may be really cool and better for these two apps, IF they actually use Web technology only.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    10·
    5 months ago

    They actually don’t just use web technologies. They’re in the long-running process of porting everything to web technologies, but they still have components which use Mozilla’s XUL/XPCOM UI framework. It’s from a time when HTML wasn’t yet capable of rendering entire applications, so it actually looks a lot like HTML and can be styled with CSS, but it is not HTML+CSS+JS.

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      3·
      5 months ago

      Thanks! Yes thought of XUL but didnt remember the name. It inherits lots of style from GTK but is not GTK. Actually I really like the Firefox toolkit, it is so damn beatiful.

      I hate using Chromium, its just worse.

      I will switch from Fedora Kinoite to Kinoite-hardened-laptop from Secureblue, which removes Firefox, but I am currently writing a small script to make the transition to using the standalone Tar archive easier.

      Random comment.

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    5 months ago

    I believe your best bet is to setup linux on some computer / server / VM and access the thing remotely from a browser. That can be gone with solutions such as Guacamole (…manual setup…) OR linuxserver/webtop that is an abstraction over Guacamole to make it more easier to setup. With that running you can access the remote machine from any browser and use those applications.