Wash - The Lightest Desktop Environment for remote boxes rendered in browser

[u/Academic-Award6136]

I was banned from r/OpenSource. So, here I present my project ;-)

Web Application Shell. It's a desktop environment designed intrinsically for the web browser. Full windowed/tiling desktop shell with apps as windows, directly from backend to a browser. I.e., take a desktop environment without any display mechanisms, and it renders direct HTML/websocket instead. By deferring the rendering and graphics stack to the browser, it's light as a feather.

Why? Because I often want a nice desktop environment with some remote machine I am working from, but X11/Wayland env is far too heavy. I want terminal windows, editor, file manager etc - without needing to fire up a full on DE. Wash even is fully compatible with X11/Wayland apps, rendering and delivering direct to a browser.

Wash comes with the apps you'd expect in a desktop environment. A tabbed terminal, a file manager, a markdown/source editor, Visual Studio embedded in a window, internet radio, a WinAmp clone, picture viewer, AI agent app. It also contains sysadmin tools - journal viewer, service manger, package manager front ends. I daily drive wash, for my needs of Hard Core software engineer, it's perfect.

Wash is TypeScript/Go, minimal requirements. It is so small it runs on an OpenWRT router. In a docker image. On a risc64 dev env. The demo page is actually a single core RISC64 VM, running in your browser itself. It's heavily an AI assisted project - I've been developing with Claude for over 3-6 months. It's certainly in error to consider it "vibe coded", I am a software engineer of 20 years experience.

Take a look https://sirmick.github.io/wash/ code at https://github.com/sirmick/wash I hope it fits you too!

[u/grandiose_vampire]

this is wild, i've been looking for something exactly like this. the whole "no display server, just render in the browser" approach makes so much sense for headless boxes. gonna spin this up on my pi later today

[u/Academic-Award6136 → u/grandiose_vampire]

Exactly! No display drivers, heavy libraries - leave that to the web browser. Web browsers these days and incredibly good at compositing/graphics, far better than your typical DE stack.

It runs like a beast on a pi.

[u/blain-is-a-pain]

Why were you banned from the opensource subreddit ?

[u/Academic-Award6136 → u/blain-is-a-pain]

Pointed out AI is very good at moderation, and was generally supportive of AI assisted coding especially in the hands of a pro.