Alternatives
Products that do what Linux installer .exe without pendrives (secure-boot compatible) does
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…
- 1
- 2ZZ
2020 · ramsdenj.com
- 3
- 4BW
2017 · github.com
- 5
- 6ZS
2019 · github.com
- 7DW
2021 · github.com
- 8
- 9BC
2018 · bootrino.com
- 10LR
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.
2025 · github.com
- 11
- 12IM
I've been working on getting NixBSD (Nix package manager + FreeBSD) to boot alongside NixOS on a shared ZFS pool. The result is a <2GB disk image you can try in QEMU or virt-manager. What works: - GRUB chainloads FreeBSD's bootloader - Both systems share a ZFS pool - Everything is defined in a single Nix flake - Fully reproducible builds (some dependencies are now cached on Cachix) Planned: - Support native compilation of NixBSD (currently cross-compiled on Linux) - Many shortcuts were taken to get this working, needs lots of cleanup - Add a semi-automated installer like nixos-wizard Try it:…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 13RL
I made a thing this afternoon. If you are using windows 10 and would like to open windows apps from the ubuntu bash shell normally you can't do that. I wrote this app to (sorta) let you do that. It's a two part app, first is a dotnet core webapi C# app that runs on your windows box. Next is a shell script that you put in your path on the ubuntu shell. It's called Rockhopper (named after a species of penguin, since you are hopping form Linux to windows with this app is just seemed like the right name :) ), and you invoke it like this: rockhopper -c code -a…
2016
- 14WN
I built this because I was tired of using the command line to mount NFS drives on Windows. Key features: - Simple GUI for mounting/unmounting NFS drives - Advanced mount settings (UID/GID mapping, transfer sizes, timeouts) - Real-time drive status and storage monitoring - Detailed drive properties view - Built with Python/tkinter, packaged as a single executable The app is particularly useful if you: - Work with Linux/Unix servers from Windows - Need to mount NFS shares frequently - Prefer GUI over command line It's open source, MIT License, and you can download the…
2025 · yani-.github.io
- 15NO
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
- 16TS
Hey HN, I’m excited to share Tiling Shell, an open-source GNOME extension I created to bring a more modern, user-friendly window management experience to Linux. Many existing solutions feel outdated and lack in user experience, so my goal with Tiling Shell is to bring a fresh, integrated approach that works well for both newcomers and advanced users. Demo video: https://youtu.be/RBoO5lgR1kA?t=20 by Omg Ubuntu Key Features: - Easily manage, edit, create, and delete custom layouts with a built-in editor. - Works seamlessly across multiple monitors, even with different scaling…
2024 · github.com
- 17
- 18AC
Hello, I have been working on a desktop app as a side project for which I needed an installer kit. I looked at some existing ones for different platforms. Felt, it benefits to have a cross platform desktop installer builder which is flexible enough to code your UI and actions (non declarative style). I have also added Github actions (sourced from Tauri) to automatically generate installer files for all macos, win and linux. Here is an effort towards it. Please share your thoughts: https://github.com/krishnakumar4a4/desktop-installer-maker
2023 · github.com
- 19LV
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
- 20AA
winsysroot is a tool which automatically and efficiently creates what is effectively a "sysroot" for Windows targets, allowing you to (cross)-compile against native Microsoft sources from any operating system and for any architecture supported by Microsoft. It also takes care of the case-sensitivity problem of the Windows SDK by automatically generating LLVM overlay specifications. It is written in pure cross-platform Go and is extremely fast it tries very hard to download the absolute minimum number of files to achive its goals. It pulls all data directly from Microsoft to avoid any legal…
2023 · github.com
- 21DT
2019 · distro.tools
- 22SM
Hi HN! I've posted this a few weeks back without much HN traction - today we've added a free community tier, so anyone can try it out. TL;DR: We’ve launched StableBuild, a new tool to easily freeze and pin Docker images, operating system packages, Python packages, and arbitrary build dependencies; in 5 lines of code: https://stablebuild.com . As the CTO at an ML startup w/ 75 people (https://edgeimpulse.com/) I’ve grown incredibly frustrated with non-deterministic builds. Last year basically every week one of our containers (we have 40+ unique ones in prod)…
2024 · stablebuild.com
- 23RC
Hi HN, this is Cesar and Rodny, developers of an open-source container runtime called Sysbox, and co-founders of a startup called Nestybox (YC S20). We launched on HN almost a year ago and got excellent feedback then (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24084758). Happy to say that over the past year, Sysbox has continued to gain traction, particularly for securing containers in production, CI/CD, and containerized dev environments. We wanted to announce an important new feature: integration between Sysbox and Kubernetes. As a quick refresher, Sysbox is a "runc" that…
2021
- 24LF
Hi HN, I just wanted to share what I have been working on for the past few months: A firmware analyzer for embedded Linux systems that helps uncovering security issues running entirely in the browser. This is a very early Alpha. It is going to be rough around the edges. But I think it provides quite a lot of value already. So please go ahead and drop a firmware (only .tar rootfs archives for now) and try to break it :)
Mar 2026 · xray.boldwark.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →