Desktop.

Open

On the box page, open the Desktop tab. Pick Desktop for a 1920x1080 XFCE desktop or Browser for one Chrome window, then click open. From the terminal:

prized desktop
prized browser --url https://example.com

The first open installs the desktop packages on the box (about two minutes, once per box; the tab shows the progress). After that a desktop is up in a few seconds.

What you get

• Desktop: XFCE with a terminal, a file manager and Chrome, on a fixed 1920x1080 screen scaled to fit your window. xdotool and wmctrl are installed alongside for driving windows from a shell.
• Browser: one maximized Chrome window on its own 1920x1080 screen and nothing else. Sign in to a site once and tools on the box can reuse the profile; or browse from the box's network.
• Keyboard and mouse work as in a native window. The tab's header has full screen and two clipboard buttons: paste sends your clipboard to the box, copy takes what was last copied on the box.
• The desktop keeps running when you close the tab. Open it again and you land on the same windows. Stop desktop in the tab, or prized desktop --stop, ends it.

Browser profiles

A profile is Chrome's user data directory, kept on the box's disk at ~/.prized/browser/<name> (default when you name none). Sign-ins, cookies and extensions persist across restarts, and a snapshot restored into a new box carries them along. Names use letters, digits, - and _, up to 64 characters.

• Starting the browser with a different profile replaces the running window.
• Starting it again with the same profile and a URL opens that page as a new tab in the running window.

Pause and resume

The desktop is processes, not disk. Nano through Small boxes hibernate and bring it back as it was; on Medium and larger a pause is a clean stop, so the desktop is gone on resume and the tab starts a fresh one. Files, installed packages and browser profiles are on the disk and survive either way. See Pause and resume.

A running desktop may count as activity for auto-pause even with nobody connected: the screen keeps being redrawn and polled. If you rely on auto-pause, stop the desktop when you are done.

Security

• The VNC server listens on the box's loopback only. Nothing new is reachable from the internet; the box keeps zero inbound ports.
• The VNC password is random and lives only on the box, in a file only your user can read. It is generated when the desktop starts from nothing; opening it again while it runs reuses the same one, so a second viewer never cuts off the first. Stopping the desktop deletes it, and so does a pause on a size that stops processes, so the next start gets a new one. The dashboard uses it for you; --no-open prints it.
• The dashboard reaches the desktop through the same path as its terminal tab: a ten-minute ticket minted by your signed-in session, the WireGuard tunnel, and a short-lived SSH certificate. The CLI forwards the port over your own SSH session; the tunnel alone cannot reach it.
• Like any listener on the box, the VNC port (5910 for the desktop, 5911 for the browser) appears in prized ports. It requires the password, and you do not need to mirror it: the desktop command forwards it itself.

Limits

• VNC, not video: a responsive desktop for editors, terminals and browsing, not smooth full-motion video. No audio.
• Fixed 1920x1080, scaled to your window. No WebRTC or Moonlight path yet, and no GPU on any box size.
• No GUI automation agent. xdotool and wmctrl are on the box for scripts: DISPLAY=:10 xdotool … targets the desktop, DISPLAY=:11 the browser window.
• One desktop and one browser window per box.

Troubleshooting