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The idea I have comes from a little known distro called Symphony (one). What they did was replace the desktop with a local server based portal. Their work ended back in 2008. I just stumbled upon it recently and it blew me away. Their implementation of a web based desktop was nothing short of horrible, but the concept was solid. But the spark of a html desktop and the power that comes with it was there. I eventually envision a new cloud based distro with Lucid Desktop, heavily modded, as the front end.

Steps I've taken so far:

• Installed LAMP
• Symlinked a separate folder to /var/www/
• Installed firefox 4 beta and prizm
• Prizm'ed out the installed localhost copy of Lucid Desktop
• Replaced the tag with a long string (20 characters)
• Set up a sh script to run at boot that sets up the window control compiz config settings so that the prizm window has no chrome, can not be maximized, minimized, closed, and is always behind.
• downloaded but not yet integrated http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpterm/ as it is a php based terminal
• Currently looking into getting a list of installed applications on host OS to be fed into Lucid Desktop And looking on how to let the user create iframe based shortcuts on the desktop and adding my own to 'cloudify' the desktop, such as the google suite (docs, email, etc)

I really think Lucid Desktop + Local server + Ubuntu is the future of computer desktops. It will provide more flexibility than anything else out there.

Please if you have any questions or comments let me know.

Someone actually emailed me asking for help with a similar concept, RevLinOS. More info here: http://revlin.org/

I thought a lot about the whole desktop/OS thing... If you look at an OS such as Palm WebOS, they do a really good job with giving devs the ability to write apps using web technologies. I don't feel like it's the same thing with desktop OSes though, I get the feeling people prefer native UIs.

Because of this, I don't think we should grab Lucid, or any other Web Desktop for that matter, and just throw it in place of gnome, KDE, or whatever other window environment. I do think that integrating it with the desktop is something we should explore in the future though.

Also, running a web desktop locally defeats the point of it being on the web, you loose the ability to access it anywhere. Hosting it locally and having some sort of dynamic DNS update client built in would be sweet.

I think what we really need to do is tie in node.js with Glib/GTK, can you imagine how awesome that would be?

I have heard of that revlin though I am not that exposed to the system . I think that the more contemporary version of this would be the cloud server some brands are now looking into.

I think that the same implementation was brought about by palm though they were not able to excite properly, most could be blamed with the lack of need the users are betting on. I think that this is actually the best time to implement this.