It's the latter, the backend process (that exposes the filesytem etc) can be anywhere and the frontend (browser or electron) will connect to it over tcp. How y

It's the latter, the backend process (that exposes the filesytem etc) can be anywhere and the frontend (browser or electron) will connect to it over tcp. How you setup vms/docker or something is up to you however as long as the theia backend (nodejs) can run in it.