Sad to see Linux turning into a web app. I thought they'd be smart enough to avoid this sort of trend. Hope they continue to support the desktop version.

Previous discussion with 632 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40940225

I think its cool but am I the only one that doesn't really think the web is a good platform for this? Like, VM stuff needs to be as close to bare metal as possible to be fast. There's special processor features that make virtualisation work well. It's amazingly efficient now. You can vastly over-allocate your hardware between VMs with good modern virtualisation software because they're so damn efficient that they only utilise CPU and memory when they need it. That means they're not just like allocated 4 GBs if you allocate 4 GB to the VM.

All these little optimisations... just aren't going to work well in a browser. I mean, I can already see that alpine (an extremely lightweight VM that I've had boot instantly with vagrant and other such stuff) is slow here. It's a cool hack. I just prefer things to be practical...

Hello again HN. Lead dev of WebVM and CTO of Leaning Technologies here. Happy to answer any question from the community.

Student here, and this has to be the most satisfying 20 minutes I spent cloning a GitHub repo in a while.

Here are a few things I encountered which might probably help others:

    # Version mismatch: 
    The install version of node.js I had (v12.22.9) was too old to meet the project's requirements (>= 18.13). 

To fix that, I used nvm to install the right Node.js version (>18.0)

    # Version check before install: Used the following to check version to verify before proceeding ahead with building it:
    node -v
    npm -v

It ran successfully, and I've been playing around with built-in Python3 and C scripts and pushed the modified repo to my personal GitHub. Thank you, dev!