Alternatives
Products that do what Full graphical desktop running on a 128MB VPS Alpine+XRDP+WindowMaker does
Built this as a guide for users of my hosting service. Everything here was run on a real instance. The Mesa/LLVM dependency is genuinely painful on a 1GB disk, and I couldn't find a way around it. WindowMaker won the window manager battle purely on dependency chain cleanliness; it pulls in no GTK, no Python, no audio stack. Happy to answer questions about any of the choices made. Screenshots at the end.
- 1LT
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.
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 2WM
2021 · github.com
- 3VQ
2020 · github.com
- 4HI
This is based on an approach I made for a very high performance message and video multiplexing server. The project died, but I'm glad I get to share the a basic version with some http test code now. I admit this is the second time I've tried to show this off here today; I posted earlier but it got lost when no-one was watching :(
2011 · github.com
- 5MA
Title says all that needs to said about it, admittedly it is stupid to "copy" any Windows feature in Linux but here we are...it is not exactly made for use by extensive audience but just a rough work of it would love any suggestion/critique on it ...
2025 · github.com
- 6TI
2017 · tux.io
- 7VC
I've long wanted to harness QEMU/KVM for my desktop virtual machines, but I'm befuddled by virt-manager's lack of support for working NVIDIA 3D acceleration, dogmatic embrace of ugly XML, and the puzzling UI decision of having to click what seems like 15 buttons to attach an ISO to a VM image. When I further learned that NVIDIA's broken 3D acceleration is the fault of libvirt as opposed to QEMU's virtio driver, I had an idea... Behold, vm-curator! A fast and friendly VM management TUI written in Rust. You can create, configure, organize, and manage VMs directly with QEMU. No libvert. No…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 8
Democratisation of local AI is key. I've been working on pushing the limits of commercial hardware, squeezing any extra bit possible. My Scientific Agentic AI hareness helped me to reallocate every single bit of it. I rewrote the Kernel, I went down the CUDA rabbit hole until I have been able to explain any bit and any ms of computational power involved in the process pushing the Qwen 30B-A3B from 8 tok7s to 19 tok/s with llama.cpp up to 22.2 tok/s with my project and 109 tok/s on not novel content and speeding up the prefill by 5-9X
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 9LV
Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack…
2021
- 10CI
One of the most frequent questions one faces while running LLMs locally is: I have xx RAM and yy GPU, Can I run zz LLM model ? I have vibe coded a simple application to help you with just that. Update: A lot of great feedback for me to improve the app. Thank you all.
2025 · can-i-run-this-llm-blue.vercel.app
- 11
I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
23d ago · github.com
- 12KP
I thought it'd be interesting to use Linux PSI (Pressure Stall Information) for an LLM runtime to trim the KV cache. This is mainly useful imo for edge devices like the Jetson Orin super nano kit which have unified memory. I haven't benched much, but plan to do so more over time and see if I can make a real use of it as I run local LLMs. Let me know if it makes sense :P (I of course vibed this idea)
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 13IW
Jul 2026 · aidekin.com
- 14LE
2016 · github.com
- 15PS
I was debating when to post this, but I've been using it locally in a variety of situations for several months and I think it's pretty stable (and usable!). There are more features I'd like to add, but I wanted to see if there was much interest before spending much more time on it right now.
2025 · github.com
- 16IB
Built a simple web app that tells you which open-source LLMs will work on your hardware. It auto-detects your specs, shows compatible models from Hugging Face, gives realistic performance estimates (tokens/sec), and recommends quantization settings. You can also manually input specs to see "what if I upgraded my RAM?" Made this after wasting time downloading giant models only to find they crawled on my hardware. Hope it saves you some frustration!
2025 · caniusellm.com
- 17IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026
- 18WB
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 19MH
Just wanted to make my first post about something interesting I've been working on for some time. Any ideas/suggestions for new hardware or software I should try out are welcome, though I will only have time for a major overhaul in a month or two where I want to redo and document everything a bit better than how it is currently. Hope this can inspire someone to start their own homelab or give some ideas to already existing ones!
2024 · github.com
- 20IB
I had 14,000 photos sitting on a drive and wanted an excuse to play with local vision models and Elixir/Phoenix. I originally tried to get LLaVA to tell me if a photo was 'good' or matched my style, but quickly learned that LLMs have terrible taste. I ended up demoting the LLM to just extract metadata, and built a custom CLIP/Ridge Regression pipeline to actually learn my preferences based on how I rate things. The stack is Phoenix/Oban on the orchestrator side, and Python/FastAPI/Instructor for the AI workers. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture,…
Apr 2026 · qwelian.com
- 21AF
Another Sunday afternoon project: add some pizzaz to your boring bare metal or virtual machine consoles! Written as a single Go binary; no dependencies. https://github.com/Fusion/modernfbv As usual, feedback please!
2022
- 22RS
Hi HN! I've been hacking on this side project for the last month or two with the goal of making it dead simple to use cloud GPUs. I ran into this problem personally during the phd, and built my own tooling around it. I always thought it'd be fun to try to turn that tooling into a more general product... and bitbop.io is the result! All you have to do is run `ssh bitbop.io`, and you get your own personal dev GPU workstation in the cloud. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
2024 · twitter.com
- 23IM
Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net
- 24NA
Hi, over the past few months I've been working on this project: Numax is a small Rust runtime that does three things: it runs WebAssembly modules in a sandbox, has a built-in local key-value store, and syncs everything across nodes with CRDTs and gossip. Basically, you write a wasm module, run it on two machines, and they converge (I hope !). It's a decentralized system... I hope someone finds it interesting! There's a whitepaper I've put a lot into, and I think the code isn't bad either! I believe there's still room in this world for software that's fun and well made, and while building…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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