AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Bor – Open-source policy management for Linux desktops
Hi HN! I've been working on Bor, an open-source system for centralized Linux desktop management. Bor consists of a lightweight Go agent and a central server. Policies are streamed to clients over mTLS/gRPC in real time—no polling—and currently support Firefox, Chrome, KDE, dconf, polkit and package management, with more coming. Version 0.8 introduces several new policy types - Thunderbird, Microsoft Edge for Business and FirewallD zones, along with a number of improvements and fixes. I'd love feedback on the architecture, policy model, and whether this is something you'd consider for…
Bor is an open-source system for managing Linux desktops from a central location. It uses a lightweight Go agent on client machines that receives policies in real time from a central server via secure connections… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hi HN, I built a small Linux CLI tool called witr (Why Is This Running?). The idea came from a situation most of us have hit: you log into a machine, see a process or port running, and immediately wonder why it exists, who started it, and what is keeping it alive right now. witr traces a process, service, or port back to its origin and responsibility chain and explains it in a way that’s quick to read, especially when you’re debugging under pressure. This is v0.1.0. It’s intentionally small and focused. Feedback, criticism, and edge cases are very welcome. Repo:…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2ST
Hello, I'm building SadServers.com, a SaaS where users can test their Linux troubleshooting skills on real Linux servers in a "Capture the Flag" fashion. I hope this is useful, to learn more about the project please see https://github.com/fduran/sadservers
2022 · sadservers.com · its alternatives →
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An application innovation platform delivering a comprehensive experience with tools to empower organizations to modernize and build new applications, accelerate AI adoption, and fuel growth.
2013 · coreos.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Distr is designed to help software engineers distribute and manage their applications or agents in customer-controlled or shared-responsibility environments. You only need a Docker Compose file or Helm chart—everything else for on-prem is handled by the platform. We’re are an open source dev tool company. Over the past couple of months, we’ve spoken with dozens of software companies to understand their challenges with on-prem deployments. We analyzed the internal tools they’ve built and the best practices from existing solutions, combining them into a prebuilt, Open Source solution that…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hello Everyone, I'm excited to introduce a new open-source observability platform and would love to hear your feedback. We are aware that there are lots of open-source/commercial tools out there. However, we believe that monitoring the clusters and extracting actionable insights requires deep know-how about the tools/domain. We mainly focused on this problem. - Alaz is an eBPF agent installed on your K8s cluster as DaemonSet. Thanks to eBPF, Alaz collects traces directly from Linux kernels. This means there's no need for sidecars, instrumentations, or service restarts. - The UI not…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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hey guys. the other day i was migrating hosting providers and i just needed something not too heavy and convenient to spin up my backups for awhile and realised there is almost nothing out there. kimchi hasn't been updated for years and cockpit is heavy. so here's something i came up with in a couple hours because of a sudden urge, nothing fancy just basic creation with cloud init, lifecycle management and image/storage, but it's modern-ish and it compiles to a 8.4mb binary inclusive of the embedded web UI, CLI and API, and only dep is libvirt.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Drop: a rootless Linux sandbox for developers. It isolates coding agents and third-party packages while preserving your work environment.
30d ago · droprun.sh · its alternatives →
- 8
:racehorse: Extremely minimal vmm for linux written in C. Hopefully someday will spin linux-vm for you. - flouthoc/wiser
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Bosun▲108Open-source monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange
2014 · bosun.org · its alternatives →
- 10
A simple golang application to automate the deployment of software releases. - skx/deployr
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
A year ago, we launched Distr here to help software vendors manage customer deployments remotely. We had agents that pulled updates, a hub with a GUI, and a lot of assumptions about what on-prem deployment needed. It turned out things get messy when your software is running in places you can't simply SSH into. Over the last year, we’ve also helped modernize a lot of home-baked solutions: bash scripts that email when updates fail, Excel sheets nobody trusts to track customer versions, engineers driving to customer sites to fix things in person, debug sessions over email (“can you take a…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Hey HN! I just released go-nbd, a lightweight Go library for effortlessly creating NBD servers and clients. Its a neat tool for creating custom Linux block devices with arbitrary backends, such as a file, byte slice or what I'm planning to use it for, a tape drive. While there are a few partially abandoned projects like this out there already, this library tries to be as maintainable as possible by only implementing the most recent handshake revision and baseline functionality for both the client and the server, while still having enough support to be useful. I'd love to get your feedback :)
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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SugarOKR▲110Free OKR software for goal setting, tracking, and management
2021 · sugarokr.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Obserware▲71Interactive system monitoring for GNU/Linux distributions
2021 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →
- 15
ServiceRadar is an open-source platform for distributed, secure network management and observability, scaling to 100k+ devices. Born from frustration with complex traditional NMS tools like Zabbix, it bridges legacy (SNMP/syslog) and modern (gNMI, OTLP) protocols for cloud-native environments. We built ServiceRadar to simplify monitoring hybrid telecom networks, evolving it into a Kubernetes-native solution with Helm and Docker support. It uses mTLS with SPIFFE/SPIRE, NATS JetStream for event streaming (90M+ EPS), and SRQL for intuitive queries. Integrated with OpenTelemetry,…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Linux Foundation survey says 70-90% of modern software constitute OSS code. Yet we are stuck with tools that scan only for vulnerabilities in 3rd party libraries and that too with high degree of false positives. I built `vet` for policy and data driven analysis of 3rd party packages that goes beyond only vulnerability and allows codifying organisational policies related to OSS consumption. https://github.com/safedep/vet Looking forward to feedback and suggestions from HN :)
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
bVisor is an SDK and runtime for safely executing bash commands directly on your host machine. We built it on the belief that "sandbox" doesn't need to mean shipping off to remote sandbox products, or spinning up local VMs / containers. Sometimes, you just want to run that bash command locally. bVisor boots a sandbox from user-space without special permissions, powered by seccomp user notifier. This allows us to intercept syscalls from guest processes and selectively virtualize them to block privilege escalation, isolate process visibility, and keep filesystem changes isolated per…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Check out our new project to add some insight into OOM kill events for Go programs. Source code: https://github.com/parca-dev/oomprof/ Description of how it was put together: https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2025/08/13/oomprof
2021 · polarsignals.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Internet blocker for the Linux desktop. Contribute to aniketpanjwani/chomper development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
A fast, rootless sandbox and virtual resource runtime for any workload, including untrusted and AI-generated code. Daemonless: a real, kernel-enforced container in ~3.5 ms from an OCI image, out of one static binary - getkern/kern
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21OO
Oso helps companies run agents in production with confidence using monitoring, access controls, and automated least privilege.
2020 · osohq.com · its alternatives →
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Not really an oprating system, Just a pile of javascript pretending to be a Desktop Environment - Lerc/notanos
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Witr – Explain why a process is running on your Linux system alternatives
- SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills alternatives
- CoreOS, a Linux distro for containers alternatives
- Distr – open-source distribution platform for on-prem deployments alternatives
- Alaz: Open-Source, Self-Hosted, eBPF-Based K8s Monitoring alternatives
- Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →