Seems fun on the surface, but they're offering folks to write in to their "careers" email (see the Info icon). They also really seem to be pushing you to create an account, or use the QR code, to save your information for later use.
I've seen instances of fun things like "Windows 98 in a browser" that were interesting projects. This seems to be someone trying to make a full-on product out of the concept, even referring to it as "cloud computing" on their Twitter account.
They can't play both sides. It's either a fun little toy, or it's a serious product. "Puter" seems to be aiming for the latter, so they deserve the relevant scrutiny.
Ironically I'd find more value in "Windows XP in a browser" than in a custom OS. if it has filesystem access and can handle most of the underlying API. Reason being that I run Linux, so if I need to run a Windows program (which I occasionally do: I'm into video game music, and a lot of the tooling stack for manipulating files is dinky Windows programs developed by Some Guy in 2013 and never really maintained), I have the following choices:
- dualboot (not doing that again, Windows 10 loved to eat my bootloader over and over and would get stuck in update loops)
- wine, which requires a lot of configuration and has weird bugs, but is really good for more heavyweight apps (foobar2000 is still king)
- virtualization, which also requires a lot of configuration. need to perform a full OS install, etc. I haven't found a way to easily spin up a virtualized windows box (I run Manjaro = Arch, let me know if you have an easy way. A while back I gave it a couple hours and couldn't figure it out, so I gave up.).
A Windows-in-browser that runs "well enough" and can access my local filesystem would let me just run the damn app, do the thing I want to do, and then call it a day. Of course, I'm sure there's lots of details I haven't thought through here. But it feels like a potentially legitimate use case.
I've seen instances of fun things like "Windows 98 in a browser" that were interesting projects. This seems to be someone trying to make a full-on product out of the concept, even referring to it as "cloud computing" on their Twitter account.
They can't play both sides. It's either a fun little toy, or it's a serious product. "Puter" seems to be aiming for the latter, so they deserve the relevant scrutiny.