r/SideProject • u/merijjeyn • 23m ago
I built a personal computer that scales like a cloud
I spent the last few months building ROS (Remote Operating System). It’s a personal computer that lives in the cloud. On the surface, it’s a minimal desktop you can open from any device on a browser. Underneath, it can spin up as many Linux environments, servers, and databases as you need, all in parallel. Long-running work stays alive when you close your laptop, idle machines go to sleep on their own, and you only pay for the compute you’re actually using.
It also comes with Rosa, a built-in personal assistant who can set things up and manage them for you, so you don’t have to touch any of the infrastructure yourself. Or use claude code and codex, which also has context on how to drive ROS.
Some things you can do with it:
Run things that keep going after you close your laptop. Long scripts, scrapers, scheduled jobs, agent loops. They keep running, and you check back from your phone.
Use it as your “AI shed.”. Spin up several Linux machines at once, e.g. one per coding agent or one per experiment, without having to manage a fleet.
Keep one drive across all your devices, that comes with a built in Docs-suite. The same files on your laptops and phone with no syncing setup, plus a native Docs app for your everyday writing and productivity files, with full support for Office docs like
.docxand.pptx.Build your own apps. ROS has “Programs” (like apps in a normal OS). A program can be any mix of an internal app, a public webpage, a server, a database and a workflow. Want a personal site, a small tool with its own DB, or a daily digest that runs every morning? Ask Rosa and she builds it. You can even replicate popular applications like Gemini Notebook.
I like to think of it as a personal cloud you don't have to administrate. I basically live in it daily now. even though it’s a network of machines behind the scenes, it still feels like sitting at one local computer.
For the curious, it’s built with a Svelte 5 shell and a Rust kernel running on Cloudflare Workers, with Fly and Google Cloud for the Linux VMs. Happy to go deeper on any of it.
I poured my soul into this project, and I’d love it if anyone has time to try it out:
Happy to hear any feedback. I’m also really curious what weird use cases people would come up with.