This OS runs in your browser

This is Puter, and it's an implementation of a full desktop within a browser.

You might not be sold on this idea yet.

Though I'll go through this in more detail later on, I will immediately: this includes a file manager, a picture editing application, a simple IDE, a camera, a recorder, a PDF reader, a web browser, and more. It's at worst a useless but impressive product, and - at best - something that's actually useful.

Before we fully dive into this desktop's capabilities, let's start with the basics. How can this be useful if we lose all of our data as soon as we close the browser?

Well, there's no such worry. You can very quickly create an account (which only requires an email, a password and nothing else, not even to click on a confirmation link).

This will make your data persistent throughout sessions, and even devices: just by opening my phone and logging in, I could find all of my pictures and customizations already applied.

Even better, if you don't want to copy over your information, Puter provides a QR code that you can scan from your phone – and voilà, you'll be logged in on any other device, instantly.

By creating an account, you get 100MB of storage out of the box (and 20 AI Chat Completion, which – thanks, but I won't be needing those).

You can get another GB of storage by inviting a friend to make an account, and you can also buy additional storage, starting at 100GB at $10 a month. So, yes, this OS does come with optional subscriptions out of the box – we already have something that most Linux distributions lack out of the box.

Ah, and of course, the website is open source on their github; the developer even publishes videos on how the infrastructure works, though I would not even dream of understanding anything about that. I only know that it's made entirely in Node, which (I think) is a terrible crime against humanity!

Since it's open source, you can also self-host it if you want, which - I can only guess - will allow you to use your local storage directly instead of relying on the cloud. You could wonder if that runs without an internet connection, but - as we will see - even if it could, you wouldn't want to.

But why? What can you do with this? Well, there are a few nice features to talk about.

Firstly, you can quickly create and publish websites. If you open the File Manager, right-click on any folder, and select "publish as website", you will be given a random subdomain puter.site that will point to that specific folder.

You can add a index.html file to change the look of the webpage and allow users to download files within; it updates pretty much instantly.

Okay, that looks fancy, but would you be able to do anything productive on the OS itself?

Puter comes with an App Center out of the box, which includes a lot of applications. Though each app has a download button, it merely adds the link to the app to your launcher: all apps are this sort-of-webpages, so you can just click "open" and they will open, which feels a bit like magic.

These seem to be re-embedding of other webpages within Puter, which does make sense – though, there's no visible performance overhead and they all behave quite well. Context menus and UI elements are extremely inconsistent, but that's understandable.

One thing I would like to see here is some additional transparency on each of these applications. Who made them? Who embedded them? Can I find them on their own website?

You're allowed to publish as many apps as you want in Puter, though they are reviewed, and you will even receive money every time they are opened. I have to say, I'm impressed here – though, this makes my "more transparency, please" request even more pressing.

In the store, we can find a barebone video editor. Though, it's not that barebone – it allows you to cut away parts of a video, yes, but also crop it, rotate it and flip it, apply various filters to it, change brightness/contrast/saturation/…, annotate the video (with lines, arrows, text, …), resize it, and more. I'm not going to switch to this as my video editing device, but still, it's more than what I was expecting.

There's a Puter Automation application that allows building, well, automations using a drag-and-drop blocks interface. It's barebone (again) but not something I expected to find at all; of course, in this day and age, it's called the "Puter AI Automation" and the default block is an AI one.

There is a Puter Blogger application that will create a blog within puter.site. It doesn't exactly feel nice to use, but it does allow to publish markdown posts – and, who knows, it might improve significantly over time.

There's even a "Subdomain Registrar" application that allows you to check for the availability (and to reserve) of puter.site subdomains. As an example, I have just registered the website librenews.puter.site, though I'm not sure what I'll do with it.

Design-wise, one available application is "Polotno" (which, again, you could also access independently as a website). It allows to create even somewhat complex designs, though these third party website embedding won't really save anything on your Puter file manager, which - in my opinion - renders them at least somewhat pointless.

However, the data is associated to your Puter account, meaning that it should also survive when switching from a device to a different one. That's at least something!

There's also Photopea, to edit RAW images. I love that "Open From Computer" will open the Puter file manager, and not my computers', but somehow Photopea won't accept my Fujifilm raw images, which is sad.

I could go on, but you can kind-of guess what the rest of the app center is: full of applications, mostly well-integrated third-party web apps embedded into Puter, covering a wide range of scoper, from musing making, to book-writing, expense tracker, and so on.

Oh, and I almost forgot: you can customize things a bit. Sorry, as a KDE developer, I just had to mention that. You can change the background (obviously), but also the UI colors and their transparency:

You can also hide/show a clock on the bottom-right corner of the screen, and choose whether you want the menubar to be part of the application or embedded in the desktop top panel. All of these settings update instantaneously.

Puter also includes notification support, though I have yet to see an application using one. Again, I would say that the greatest weakness of this OS is the fact that so many applications are just third party websites embedded in Puter, and won't follow Puter's API.

Of course, this still hardly beats your own OS right now. All of these applications could be accessed just as well as websites, and tools like Nextcloud could provide the same level of sync between devices that Puter offers.

Though, one thing that I'm looking forward is this promise by the Puter developer. They are working to include an emulation application that will virtualize Linux applications on the web, and allow you to interact with them. If that works, it means that Puter will also allow you to run Linux apps – though, I'd expect a significant performance overhead. All of that, by the way, would still run locally on your device.

Now, I have to say that the developer is a bit too obsessed with integrating AI everywhere (he recently posted an image with the title "Cloud OS -> AI OS?! 🤯" on his subreddit, which I hope was a meme).

However, one proof of concept he has shared looks pretty cool: by having a standard API that's exposed to a language model, you can use natural language to perform even complex actions on Puter; as an example, you can just ask to organize files and folders on your desktop.

There's also work ongoing for thing such as a command line interface to interact with puter; this program allows you to log-in to your account, upload or download files, and more. Ideally, this would mean that you could keep a local folder in sync with a Puter one, which would finally start to make sense to me.

It would mean that I could use Puter as a Nextcloud alternative, but where I have an entire OS in the browser, which integrates with lots of other web applications, to see and do light work on my data from any device but still with the same interface, whilst still keeping serious business on my local machine.

Though, that's still far from reality. Maybe one day? For now, I'll stick to Nextcloud.