This is a wonderful project! I've been thinking a lot about making such a unified desktop stack for a while now; web technology has matured to the point where I think it's feasible to build a complete environment a la Smalltalk/Symbolics but with a modern feature set.
Obviously this has deficiencies but like it or not the web _is_ computing for the vast majority of people and exploring/pushing its limits of user experience is something few at all seem interested in.
Projects like Arc[1] and suckless[2] approach browsers in novel (albeit divergent) ways, but as a whole it seems to be a very unexplored problem space.
The idea of an Engelbart[3] style system built for the modern hypermedia-capable platform is an intoxicating one that desperately needs more attention.
Intoxicating indeed. I'm partly hoping that the efforts of WASM/WASI will weaken the stiffing grip Android and iOS have had on the experience most people have with their personal computers. The fruits of UX designers at Apple and Google are phenomenal, don't get me wrong, but I'm convinced the App Store business model has led them to stifle any kind of innovation that doesn't originate from within their house.
I'm thinking, a mobile first, cross platform desktop environment that's built to run apps built upon the WASM component model. Just a runtime even. I guess it'll be replacing a big part of the OS's job but on the other hand, it'll have first class support for web/instant apps. Yes, email me if you're working on anything like this.
Yeah, despite all its shortcomings Flash had one thing and that was opening up the web to a rich UX. Today, despite all the progress in JS, CSS and browser support for page manipulation, we’re nowhere near what used to be possible with Flash
> I've been thinking a lot about making such a unified desktop stack for a while now; web technology has matured to the point where I think it's feasible to build a complete environment a la Smalltalk/Symbolics but with a modern feature set.
Kind of a Chrome OS but not so tied with the Google ecosystem?
No. Chrome is just an app. One that happens to host the most amazing living/alive medium mankind has created.
The page is all you need. A web site can be a canvas where everything can come together. And it can pull in other sites and capabilities.
We do need some new APIs for the web platform to flourish fully. Some small local host services might fill in. Or yes we could indeed enhance the browser. But the idea is that it's the page not the browser creating the experience. The page is the hypermedium.
> It is easy to get distracted when you do many different things on the same device. Think of rooms as profiles but for the same person. You can have different rooms based on what you do and arrange them with things for only that purpose. Maybe change the wallpaper to something related to set the mood.
This is something I've been looking for in other DEs, but never found.
I was just thinking the other day I’d also really like that for my terminal history, especially since I’ve often worked at “bring your own device” sized companies.
I've been doing that for a decade+ now and it's marvelous.
I key everything off a shell variable called SESSION, and have a few scripts to set that before spinning up a screen/tmux instance if I don't already have one running for the context in question.
Woah, this is pretty cool. The page is also the only occurrence I've seen of the term 'Web 3.0' on something this old (abeit meaning something slightly different).
Here [1] is the link to FAQ, which answer 95% of my questions. Highlight below. ( I was thinking if it was a DE based on WebGPU and Canvas )
>What is Kera Desktop based on?
Mostly web technologies. Kera Desktop is written in vanilla javascript and does not rely on third-party frameworks but uses some independent libraries.
>Why is it based on web technologies?
Easy to support different OS. Everyone's OS of choice might be different. Sometimes it can't be a choice because you're forced to use an app that isn't available on the platform you like. Moreover, you might be using several
devices with different OS. Thanks to Kera Desktop being cross-platform and its sync function, you will always have the same interface with your stuff regardless of OS.
Better integration with web apps. More and more things are already being done on the web. But things are stuck on a browser window. Kera Desktop brings more integration to the web apps with the desktop. When both worlds speak the same language, it will be easier for developers to work. Web apps can draw their windows on Kera Desktop. This alone literally removes a significant border between desktop and web app.
I'm intrigued by the idea of using web browsers to experiment with new computer interfaces. Because everything we do with a computer can be done decently well inside a browser (e.g. see ChromeOS), any prototype can quickly be used day-to-day for all computer activities, which means I'm more likely to test thoroughly. Another big advantage is it's very easy to make a raw electron app that will work on any operating system and just start experimenting with UI features. It wouldn't be super fast or resource efficient, but you could do a lot with it.
My pet idea for a new interface would be to turn away from apps and windows and have everything display to the user as a file. A browser tab would show up as a .url in the filesystem and you could interact with it as a usual web page inside the file interface. It would be a strongly spatial interface, i.e. the given tab would always live in the same spot in the folder alongside .txt, .pdf, etc. There are some apps out there that try to keep the spatial layout of windows (e.g. https://funk-isoft.com/display-maid.html) but it seems to me that just forcing the file and window interfaces to be the same thing would do this better.
Have I implemented it the above idea? Nope. A decent prototype would probably only take a week, but the thought of maintaining such an important part of my computer as the first and maybe only user seems pretty daunting. So kudos to the Kera dev for getting to work and getting it out there into the world!
A Web-based desktop pretty much sums up why technology today is terrible. I assume they have a browser that runs in the browser, and that they'll add browser APIs to make it easier to do browser-in-browser. Maybe then implement a minimal desktop environment in the browser-in-browser browser, and then add another API...
A GTK-based desktop pretty much sums up why technology today is terrible. I assume they have GTK applications that run in the DE, and that they have GTK APIs to make it easier. Maybe then implement a minimal desktop in the GTK app, and then add another api...
But in more serious terms: Web-tech while not being made for applications has gotten pretty good at it (why do you think so many new things are just webapps nowadays or atleast under the surface with something like Electron or React Native). It's just another abstraction on top of an abstraction on top of an abstraction... There's nothing inherently terrible about it.
Wasn't very clear to me either. It looks like this is based on Linux but the entire desktop environment runs on html/css/js, i.e., a web browser runs the show.
While the idea of a desktop written in a RAD/high-level language seems enticing to me, I'd be curious to see some benchmarks on memory use and general latency first. It does seem more fun to program against than GTK or KDE...
> Grid-styled menus and icon-focused, color-coded items are easy to find and remember.
Reminds me a little of radial menus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu). They don't handle dynamic context menu contents well but they're amazingly efficient.
> Interacting is even faster since Kera Desktop features “press and hold, move and release” gestured menus. Saved you a click!
Note that you can also use right-click menus this way on macOS and GNOME. That is, you mouse down, drag your cursor to the item, and mouse up to select it. The only downside is that if you regularly use Windows it's annoying to unlearn this behavior.
Yeah I really wanna do radial menus sometime. The video game Sacrifice had nested radials where you could also basically gesture, just go left then up for example. Very explorable & high radix.
Also on XFCE, presumably because it is based on GTK like GNOME, all 3 menu selection methods (right-click, hold down, move, release; right-click and release, move, left-click; right-click and release, move, right-click) work identically.
It is good to have all methods, because the first is best for simple menus while the others are more convenient for complex menus with many hierarchy levels and long lists of menu options.
> Note that this is how right-click menus operate on macOS
Huh? That's not how mine work. Is there a setting for this that I forgot about?
Mine are right-mouse-click (external mouse or trackpad), cursor to item, and then right or left click to select. You can keep your right button clicked, but it's not necessary.
Odd, it does work that way for me! If I move the cursor over a file in Finder, hold right click, move to the context menu option I want, and release the right mouse button, it triggers the action.
In windows the release doesn’t do anything, the right click action just toggles the menu open/not open, so you left click the context menu option after it opens.
Readit News
Obviously this has deficiencies but like it or not the web _is_ computing for the vast majority of people and exploring/pushing its limits of user experience is something few at all seem interested in.
Projects like Arc[1] and suckless[2] approach browsers in novel (albeit divergent) ways, but as a whole it seems to be a very unexplored problem space.
The idea of an Engelbart[3] style system built for the modern hypermedia-capable platform is an intoxicating one that desperately needs more attention.
[1]: https://thebrowser.company/
[2]: https://surf.suckless.org/ with https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ and https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/
[3]: https://archive.org/details/motherofalldemos_reel1
I'm thinking, a mobile first, cross platform desktop environment that's built to run apps built upon the WASM component model. Just a runtime even. I guess it'll be replacing a big part of the OS's job but on the other hand, it'll have first class support for web/instant apps. Yes, email me if you're working on anything like this.
Kind of a Chrome OS but not so tied with the Google ecosystem?
The page is all you need. A web site can be a canvas where everything can come together. And it can pull in other sites and capabilities.
We do need some new APIs for the web platform to flourish fully. Some small local host services might fill in. Or yes we could indeed enhance the browser. But the idea is that it's the page not the browser creating the experience. The page is the hypermedium.
This is something I've been looking for in other DEs, but never found.
> Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands.
I key everything off a shell variable called SESSION, and have a few scripts to set that before spinning up a screen/tmux instance if I don't already have one running for the context in question.
There's a somewhat dated snapshot of some of my config files (relevant and otherwise) at https://github.com/dlthomas/config-files
Room is normspeak.
>What is Kera Desktop based on?
Mostly web technologies. Kera Desktop is written in vanilla javascript and does not rely on third-party frameworks but uses some independent libraries.
>Why is it based on web technologies?
Easy to support different OS. Everyone's OS of choice might be different. Sometimes it can't be a choice because you're forced to use an app that isn't available on the platform you like. Moreover, you might be using several devices with different OS. Thanks to Kera Desktop being cross-platform and its sync function, you will always have the same interface with your stuff regardless of OS.
Better integration with web apps. More and more things are already being done on the web. But things are stuck on a browser window. Kera Desktop brings more integration to the web apps with the desktop. When both worlds speak the same language, it will be easier for developers to work. Web apps can draw their windows on Kera Desktop. This alone literally removes a significant border between desktop and web app.
[1] https://gitlab.com/kerahq/Kera-Desktop#frequenty-asked-quest...
My pet idea for a new interface would be to turn away from apps and windows and have everything display to the user as a file. A browser tab would show up as a .url in the filesystem and you could interact with it as a usual web page inside the file interface. It would be a strongly spatial interface, i.e. the given tab would always live in the same spot in the folder alongside .txt, .pdf, etc. There are some apps out there that try to keep the spatial layout of windows (e.g. https://funk-isoft.com/display-maid.html) but it seems to me that just forcing the file and window interfaces to be the same thing would do this better.
Have I implemented it the above idea? Nope. A decent prototype would probably only take a week, but the thought of maintaining such an important part of my computer as the first and maybe only user seems pretty daunting. So kudos to the Kera dev for getting to work and getting it out there into the world!
But in more serious terms: Web-tech while not being made for applications has gotten pretty good at it (why do you think so many new things are just webapps nowadays or atleast under the surface with something like Electron or React Native). It's just another abstraction on top of an abstraction on top of an abstraction... There's nothing inherently terrible about it.
While the idea of a desktop written in a RAD/high-level language seems enticing to me, I'd be curious to see some benchmarks on memory use and general latency first. It does seem more fun to program against than GTK or KDE...
Reminds me a little of radial menus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu). They don't handle dynamic context menu contents well but they're amazingly efficient.
> Interacting is even faster since Kera Desktop features “press and hold, move and release” gestured menus. Saved you a click!
Note that you can also use right-click menus this way on macOS and GNOME. That is, you mouse down, drag your cursor to the item, and mouse up to select it. The only downside is that if you regularly use Windows it's annoying to unlearn this behavior.
It is good to have all methods, because the first is best for simple menus while the others are more convenient for complex menus with many hierarchy levels and long lists of menu options.
Huh? That's not how mine work. Is there a setting for this that I forgot about?
Mine are right-mouse-click (external mouse or trackpad), cursor to item, and then right or left click to select. You can keep your right button clicked, but it's not necessary.
In windows the release doesn’t do anything, the right click action just toggles the menu open/not open, so you left click the context menu option after it opens.
also top-screen menu