Microterm runs Linux VM in any browser tab via WASM, RISCV64 emulation
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Microterm is a fully compliant Linux virtual machine that runs in any browser tab. It is designed for real development and operations workflows, not demo-only terminal output. You can use it on desktop, tablets, and phones, including iOS home-screen PWA installs.Under the hood, Microterm combines Restty (libghostty + WebGPU) web terminal rendering and a TinyEMU-backed Alpine Linux guest on RISC-V64. The VM image is chunk-loaded in the browser and booted locally.I successfully used it to run Codex directly without leaving an in-app preview inside X app or Telegram :) Can be used to SSH to any server, play with Kubernetes and Tailscale.Let me know what you guys think!!
HN · launched Feb 22, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 72%) · 2 views
Niche: software and system emulators · 114 launches, 3 in the last 7 days ▼ -70% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 114 launches in software and system emulators →
Could you build this?
No Compiling and optimizing a full RISC-V 64-bit Linux emulator in WebAssembly with virtual networking, filesystem persistence, and container execution requires deep systems and compiler engineering.
What it would actually take: Requires porting an emulator like TinyEMU or building a custom RISC-V interpreter/JIT targeted to WebAssembly with SharedArrayBuffer and Web Workers. It demands custom virtual device drivers (virtio-net, virtio-block mapped to IndexedDB), userspace networking translation (e.g., slirp or Tailscale userspace wireguard), and terminal rendering via xterm.js or custom WebGL engines. Deep systems programming in C/Rust and advanced WebAssembly know-how are mandatory.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: iSH
Concerns raised: Minimal documentation and unclear high-level use cases, Security and trust - ability to verify customizations to base Alpine Linux, Local persistence security model on iOS
Feature requests: Local bootstrapping capability on iOS, Performance comparison documentation with iSH
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 154 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #135 of 155 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 113 days after the earliest competitor.
- VsTerm · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- cave-vm · ph · 2026-10-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- 1VM · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- 2B0X virtuall machine · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Vpod · hn · 2026-06-17 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- machine0 · hn · 2026-06-15 · 96 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I'm running parallel Pi agents on a local sandbox · hn · 2026-05-03 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Node-Vmm · hn · 2026-05-04 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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