finestra
8 posts
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Going beyond: Finestra 0.4, X11 applications and a month of hardening
Eight releases separate the ARM build from Finestra 0.4.0. Firefox, Thunderbird and X11 programs now run in a window; sessions survive a lost connection and a slow one; and the desktop is easier to operate.
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Finestra on a Raspberry Pi
Now that Finestra runs on ARM, it runs on the Raspberry Pi in your drawer too, even an old Pi 3 with 1 GB of RAM. No desktop install needed.
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Finestra is now available on ARM processors
Finestra 0.3.8 ships an arm64 build next to the x86 one. It runs on AWS Graviton and other ARM servers, it is tested on the same six distributions, and the one-line installer picks the right build by itself.
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Finestra from your phone
Finestra listens on localhost, so a phone reaches it the same way a laptop does — one SSH app, one port forward, and the desktop is in the mobile browser. Three screens in ConnectBot, then localhost:7070.
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Close the tab, the shell keeps running
Finestra 0.3.7 lets a terminal outlive its browser. Shut the laptop, come back tomorrow, and the build is still going — with nothing to type and no tmux to remember.
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See Finestra in action
We have an official video showing how to install it, with a quick walkthrough through the basic features in a headless t3.medium instance on AWS
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How Finestra compares to other web desktop projects
daedalOS, Puter, Webtop, xpra, Greenfield and Cockpit are all excellent, and none of them is doing the same job. A tour of the browser-desktop landscape, and the one question Finestra answers.
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What Finestra is
A desktop environment that runs in a browser tab and drives a headless Linux server — a real PTY, a file manager, a system manager, and native Linux applications drawn on the server.