Webtop – Alpine,Ubuntu,Fedora,and Arch containers containing full desktop envs

[windexh8er]

I've been using the LSIO Webtop images for a few years. They're awesome for composable desktops that I run behind a VPN for a quick and easy dirty connection at home.

Combine the Webtop images by forcing it's traffic through the Gluetun [0] container and you're up and running. These Webtop containers are nice and snappy as well thanks to Kasm. Awesome OSS.

[0] https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun

[Havoc]

This is me being rather lazy admittedly, but do you have a compose/similar for connecting them by chance?

[yonatan8070]

Could one build off this to run the desktops on the local host's display? I.e. as an IoT device with a display and some custom UI?

[chrisweekly]

> "Warning

Do not put this on the Internet if you do not know what you are doing.

By default this container has no authentication and the optional environment variables CUSTOM_USER and PASSWORD to enable basic http auth via the embedded NGINX server should only be used to locally secure the container from unwanted access on a local network. If exposing this to the Internet we recommend putting it behind a reverse proxy, such as SWAG, and ensuring a secure authentication solution is in place. From the web interface a terminal can be launched and it is configured for passwordless sudo, so anyone with access to it can install and run whatever they want along with probing your local network."

I hope everyone intrigued by this interesting and potentially very useful project takes heed of this warning.

[satertek]

That warning applies to anything you run locally. And going further, in this day and age, I would never put up any home service without it being behind Cloudflare Access or some form of wireguard tunnel.

[hifikuno]

Yeah, I made a mistake with my config. I had setup SWAG, with Authelia (i think?). Got password login working with 2fa. But my dumbass didn't realize I had left ports open. Logged in one day to find a terminal open with a message from someone who found my instance and got in. Called me stupid (I mean they're not wrong) and all kinds of things and deleted everything from my home drive to "teach me a lesson". Lesson painfully learnt.

But before that happened Webtop was amazing! I had Obsidian setup so I could have access on any computer. It felt great having "my" computer anywhere I went. The only reason I don't have it set up is because I made the mistake of closing my free teir oracle cloud thinking I could spin up a fresh new instance and since then I haven't been able to get the free teir again.

[gbraad]

I created personalized image with tailscale and kasmvnc for this particular reason, ... not on a public VPS. you can find images on my github as inspiration; do not directly copy unless you understand what you are doing.

[fulafel]

Also note that their example docker config will allow anyone from the internet to connect, and even add a incoming rule in your host firewall to allow it. This is because they don't specify the port like -p 127.0.0.1:hostport:containerport (or the analog in the docker-compose config).

[asyx]

No they won’t. Octoprint (3d printing server) had a similar warning but they had to introduce actual user accounts to secure the system because people ignored it.

[macinjosh]

If a good password is used HTTP basic auth is plenty secure over HTTPS so that everything is encrypted.

[dymk]

We had an application that had quite the complex build process, and targeted only macOS and Linux. The mechanical engineers all used Windows, and needed to use the application. Rather than buying them macbooks or having them manage a Linux box, I wound up building something like Webtop with webvnc, and deployed containers to google cloud. Engineers could go to a URL and access the application, no need to download or install anything. It worked pretty well, all things considered.

[chromakode]

Selkies[1] is another interesting project in this space. It uses webrtc for low latency streaming and remote desktop suitable for gaming in the browser.

[1]: https://selkies-project.github.io/selkies-gstreamer/

[selkiesproject]

Maintainer here! Thank you for the post.

While our focus is for delivering high-performance remote 3D graphical workloads for vanilla Kubernetes and HPC clusters in general, our project should be trivial for anyone to also deploy in their X11 desktop, especially with NVIDIA.

[mch82]

Since the website doesn’t have pictures or videos… Is “webtop” a way to package GUI desktop apps in a Docker container so that the only dependencies to run the app are Docker Desktop and a web browser?

[weitzj]

Yes. From the documentation there are some Screenshots and this is possible. Like starting a standalone Firefox browser inside docker desktop and accessing it via a browser vnc session.

But you get to control the keyboard/clipboard and it can add apparently watermarks to the vnc session for DLP functionality and you have a web http to take screenshots of your vnc sessions.

[ranger_danger]

Looks very similar to neko: https://neko.m1k1o.net

[mopoke]

And, of course, I decided to see what happened if I fired up firefox in webtop and loaded webtop in it. Oops.

[Dansvidania]

seems only natural, I sympathize

[bo0tzz]

My pipedream is to have a containerized desktop environment like this that outputs directly to a physical monitor over HDMI/DP without needing an X server on the host machine. So far I haven't found any clear answers on whether that's possible at all.

[jazzyjackson]

I feel I've been nerdsniped or, some other term for your quest being contagious, I also now need to know if this is possible

I found a thread from someone who seems to know what they're talking about saying it's not going to happen "on your hardware", but doesn't mention what hardware might be required

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/can-intel-integrated-gpu-out...

Edit actually reading that link again it sounds like a USB adapter worked right away as a monitor for the VM and the OP is asking how to prevent this ! So seems you just need to enable GPU passthrough, and a USB HDMI will appear to your VM ? Will have to try this later today

[sabrehagen]

My desktop environment does exactly this: https://github.com/sabrehagen/desktop-environment

[selkiesproject]

I can only answer for NVIDIA, as that was the platform we developed on, but it should be possible to encapsulate the X11 server within the container without starting an X server on the host machine, and then plug in to the monitor you designate.

I can answer further if you are satisfied with the directions found within https://github.com/selkies-project/docker-nvidia-glx-desktop. It has a lot of effort to NOT require a monitor, but it should also work with one.

[ctm92]

Kasm [1] also has ready-to-use images that work similar. They are also customizable to contain own applications or configuration. Intended to be used with their Kasm Workspaces solution, but they also work standalone just fine.

[1] https://hub.docker.com/u/kasmweb

[PhilippGille]

The images described in the original post are Kasm based: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/#options-in...

[NKosmatos]

Thanks for this, they have many images with an online working demo for 3 minutes to try it out. For sure I'm going to have another look at Kasm.

[mhitza]

Anyone have more info on this? Does it run systemd in those containers (I didn't see any systemd specific mounts).

This would be interesting to try out, as docker (via compose) is a bit easier to manage than - for example - VMs with virt-manager/cockpit-machines.

[r3c0nc1l3r]

No systemd, these just start a shell script on init that launches the WM. They're based around the open-source component of this product: https://www.kasmweb.com/docs/latest/index.html

I find that they are slightly more sluggish than Moonlight/Sunshine for remote streaming, but generally faster/better than x11vnc. Not quite good enough for gaming yet, but plenty for web browsing, Blender, etc.

[selkiesproject]

It's possible to use tini, supervisord, dumb-init, and other init 1 services for containers. Bit of a heavy workaround to make it work with desktop environments, but works.

[iddan]

Back when I was in middle school in Israel the system used for communication between teachers students and parents was called Webtop. They actually went all the way to implement OS desktop experience in the browser (this is long long ago) it was very silly but cute

[fosron]

Why did i have to find this at 3AM. Thanks though.

[euph0ria]

What are some use cases for this?

[hugs]

software testing. it's always software testing.

[bitsandbooks]

See also: the RDP version. https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-rdesktop/

[Jnr]

How come Gnome is not there?

[selkiesproject]

GNOME forces OpenGL 3D compositing with no way to turn off, which is very uncomfortable without a GPU. Every other X11 desktop environment allows to turn them off, which is more tolerable when using llvmpipe, the software CPU Mesa OpenGL implementation.

[doubled112]

While I've never used GNOME inside a KasmVNC session, it used to feel slow on reasonably powerful machines in an Xrdp session.

That'd be my first guess.

[adultSwim]

Are there any suggestions for something similar, but without the use case of access through a browser?

[imran9m]

Nice. Finally easy way to test them!!

[deelowe]

I was just looking for something like this. Awesome!

[mcflubbins]

What the heck is the webtop logo? Am I just dense? I can't make out what its supposed to be? Maybe a penguin somewhere in there, but... I dunno.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linuxserver/docker-templat...

[BLKNSLVR]

Looks to me like an AI generated Firefox-ish logo with a Linux / Penguin motif to replace the Fox motif.