Sandstorm really had this kind of feeling. Not that it presented as a desktop environment visually - but it offered a much more integrated “computer” of documents versus silod web site apps where you need to open each site to see the files in the app. https://sandstorm.io/
On the other side of things, you can just run an SSH + X11 server for remoting; and have fairly good integration between windows controlled by a remote process on your desktop, and windows controlled by a process on your laptop. Over fast links it’s nicer than RDP kinds of protocols.
Finally Plan 9 really runs with this idea - you can mount the processors of another system to use them on yours. Plan 9 is a distributed operating system, designed to make a network of heterogeneous and geographically separated computers function as a single system. In a typical Plan 9 installation, users work at terminals running the window system rio, and they access CPU servers which handle computation-intensive processes.
Plan B (built on top of Plan 9) and Octopus (built on top of Inferno) were closer to that - Plan 9 and Inferno had the fundamental operators but not the environment to exploit something like that, whereas Plan B/Octopus had interesting idea of "Personal Mainframe" which centralised a single person's computing experience, while making the peripherals composable.
This meant for example that you could have your "personal mainframe" in your office, then go with your "laptop terminal" to a conference hall, and when it came to your presentation instead of attaching the laptop to a display, a room-local computer could be used for its resources like screen and audio. All the while you have continuity because applications stored the state on your "mainframe"
I vaguely remember a quote from someone at Bell Labs explaining that, when they left, one of the hardest things was realising they couldn’t just turn on their home computer and just pick up what they were doing exactly where they had left it at the office anymore.
There's (theoretically) nothing standing in the way of making self-hosting of serverside apps as easy and painless as installing mobile apps, except someone has to do the infrastructure/integration work to make that UX come true. Docker got us 80% of the way there, but maintaining a complex setup can still be painful even for seasoned sysops (and we'd rather not take our work home more often than we already do). Sandstorm added another 80% and I wish it could take off like mobile did.
> Plan 9 really runs with this idea - you can mount the processors of another system to use them on yours
as i understand it, it's more that you mount your window on a cpu server so your computation-intensive process can draw into it; there isn't a filesystem interface to the processor itself
On the other side of things, you can just run an SSH + X11 server for remoting; and have fairly good integration between windows controlled by a remote process on your desktop, and windows controlled by a process on your laptop. Over fast links it’s nicer than RDP kinds of protocols.
Finally Plan 9 really runs with this idea - you can mount the processors of another system to use them on yours. Plan 9 is a distributed operating system, designed to make a network of heterogeneous and geographically separated computers function as a single system. In a typical Plan 9 installation, users work at terminals running the window system rio, and they access CPU servers which handle computation-intensive processes.