Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to LifeboatLinux, recover your damaged system from a 35Mb EFI Linux distro
I was tired of having to search for a USB drive every time I mess something with my computer so I decided to create this small EFI file that can be put in your EFI partition to boot from it. It has everything you should ever need to mount your filesystem and chroot to it so you can fix it. You just need to drop the file in your EFI partition and you can boot to it from your BIOS menu. I would appreciate feedback and ideas to make it better.
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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How often do you screw up the system so much you have to reformat the disk (without losing data) to fix it? Well, sometimes I do, and sometimes I can't be bothered to burn a live ISO onto a USB stick. There's initramfs, but it's hardly a pleasant environment, with network configuration and all. My go-to solution has typically been to create a chroot with busybox and a few utilities in /tmp, chroot into it, and then kill services that use the solid drive so that I can unmount it. That's an error-prone process, and sometimes systemd itself uses disk, so you can't unmount the drive despite…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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ohai! I've released Lightwhale 3, which is possibly the easiest way to self-host Docker containers. It's a free, immutable Linux system purpose-built to live-boot straight into a working Docker Engine, thereby shortcutting the need for installation, configuration, and maintenance. Its simple design makes it easy to learn, and its low memory footprint should make it especially attractive during these times of RAMageddon. If this has piqued your interest, do check it out, along with its easy-to-follow Getting Started guide. In any event, have a nice day! =)
Apr 2026 · lightwhale.asklandd.dk · its alternatives →
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Support for bootable OS containers (bootc) and generating disk images - podman-desktop/extension-bootc
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Rem▲83CLI trash that makes it ridiculously easy to recover files.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Over the last year or so I have worked on a research linux distribution in my spare time. It’s not a distribution for researchers (like Scientific Linux), but my personal playground project to research linux distribution development, i.e. try out fresh ideas.
2019 · michael.stapelberg.ch · its alternatives →
- 8CD
2017 · excamera.com · its alternatives →
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This project contains no code from Linux, BSD, Minix, or any other OS. Everything up until this point is written entirely from scratch, including a pure microkernel (that only implements multiprocessor priority scheduling, memory management, and interprocess communication), a work-in-progress implementation of the standard C library, and a variety of servers that provide drivers and other essential OS functionality. At the time of writing this post, the servers provide drivers for the keyboard, NVMe SSDs (that works on real hardware), a Unix-like virtual file system (with a single root…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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It is fairly simple, but useful for non-power users: a statically-linked Qt app that gracefully edits Windows Boot Manager to do a reboot-once into GRUB, which in turn launches ZorinOS live/installer from disk loopback. I needed to make a custom initramfs with dislocker in it, and to squeeze it a little (default Windows EFI partition is not so big). Currently my biggest issue is that systemd is unable to shut down gracefully when rootfs is mounted from such a deep loop stack. The other is that installing to full disk crashes right after it successfully damages the partition table. I…
Apr 2026 · 1clicklinux.org · its alternatives →
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Get ExpanDrive for macOS, Windows, or Linux. Mount every major cloud as a native drive in minutes. Free for personal use, $29/month flat for teams up to 10 users.
2019 · expandrive.com · its alternatives →
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It's quite limited but does the job, I invite anybody not aware of what cram tests are to give them a try, being on Unix with the original cram or Windows with this one ;)
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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This project addresses the inefficiencies of traditional Dockerfile-based container builds where each customization layer creates storage bloat through duplicate dependencies from repeated apt-get install commands, network inefficiency from redundant package downloads across different images, and slow iteration cycles requiring full rebuilds of all previous steps. Our solution enables building minimal base images from scratch using debootstrap that precisely include only required components in the initial build, while allowing creation of specialized variants (Java, Kafka, etc.) from these…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Experience the benefits of high-performance, secure, and budget-friendly VPS hosting with SSD Nodes. Get started today!
2014 · jarvys.io · its alternatives →
- 16
Hey any astrophysicist reading hn there? Was sick in august (yeah isn't that nice) and made a small python fits table viewer for the terminal with textual. It would be great to have people try it so if you find any issue I can improve it. If you have no FITS file but would like to try regardless there are some test file in `/test`. Ciao!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I wrote an article about how to get Nix on your Steam Deck! Big takeaways for me: * Steam Decks are very fun to hack on * Linux Consoles are good * There are more knobs in systemd units than I remember * Flatcar Linux is a thing that exists * Remoting into a console is fun * A/B boots are less interesting than one might expect when you're used to NixOS
2022 · determinate.systems · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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i've been a big fan of fedora's atomic distros and i decided to make my own but arch based to get the best of both worlds, which is kind of funny now because it looks exactly like silverblue. is it worth it? not sure, but it's been a interesting experience – and it's usable as a daily driver if your specs match. worth noting that because of the constraints of the setup you can develop something similar on your main machine without any realistic possibility of data loss since you never really touch the bootloader or the filesystem (partitioning and so on).
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Facebook's Katran looked too scary (and I don't do C++), so I thought I would investigate using XDP/eBPF to redirect packets at high speed and Go to do the control plane work of health-checking backed servers and managing configuration. With luck the resulting binary should be easy to deploy by non-developers. It's still not mature, but seems to work. Code was written in a very exploratory manner, and I'm not a developer so it is quite shocking at the moment, but I aim to improve it. It is intended to be horizontally scalable with ECMP and has been tested on service providing…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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How puffnfresh, my coworker, made a single command to download, assemble, and boot the VM image is arguably as cool as the port itself!
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →