Commerce · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Linux sysadmin course – eight years on
Almost eight years ago I launched an online “Linux sysadmin course for newbies” here at HN. It was a side-project that went well, but never generated enough money to allow me to fully commit to leaving the Day Job. After surviving the Big C, and getting made redundant I thought I might improve and relaunch it commercially – but my doctors are a pessimistic bunch, so it looked like I didn’t have the time. Instead, I rejigged/relaunched it via a Reddit forum this February as free and open - and have now gathered a team of helpers to ensure that it keeps going each month even after I can’t…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Linux sysadmin course – eight years on launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1LS
Almost eight years ago I launched an online “Linux sysadmin course for newbies” here at HN. It was a side-project that went well, but never generated enough money to allow me to fully commit to leaving the Day Job. After surviving the Big C, and getting made redundant I thought I might improve and relaunch it commercially – but my doctors are a pessimistic bunch, so it looked like I didn’t have the time. Instead, I rejigged/relaunched it via a Reddit forum this February as free and open - and have now gathered a team of helpers to ensure that it keeps going each month even after I can’t…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 2LS
Kicked my course off today - grep101.com - with lessons starting Monday. I think I've got the pricing right to attract a good class of keen learners for this first run through...
2012 · its alternatives →
- 3

A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →
- 4

- 5AF
I was working on this for a year. More than 80 completely free videos alongside a free booklet for LPIC1 preparation or to be be used anyone who wants to learn more about GNU/Linux. Feedbacks are more than welcomed.
2023 · linux1st.com · its alternatives →
- 6

Hey HN! This is a fun/educational project I built to learn OS programming. I started working on it right after graduating high school last year and have been working on it on and off during my first year of university. It features a TCP/IP stack, an HTTP server, a RAM file system, a BIOS bootloader, paging and memory management, and concurrent tasks based on cooperative scheduling, along with a custom library. It's written in a C programming style focused on safety (based on a custom library of core abstractions) that's inspired by the writing of Chris Wellons (nullprogram.com).…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7M2
Hello Dear HN Folks. I would like to share with you my journey from testing to software engineer in test, then build engineer, DevOps engineer, cloud engineer, and software engineer today. It took me from 2004 to 2024 today. It was quite the ride and I tried to write down my experience during this journey. I still have doubts, fears and everything. I wanted to inspire those who also wished to embark on this journey that it's not impossible. It is hard though. Not gonna lie. And I had some luck along the way for sure. But with passion and stubbornness and determination one can go to places.…
2024 · skarlso.github.io · its alternatives →
- 8

After 6 years of coding almost every day, I'm finally ready to show HN. There's a lot going on here, looking forward to your guy's feedback.
Jul 2026 · jaclang.org · its alternatives →
- 9JL
Hello everyone, I just launched my bootstrapped (no funding) online learning startup, after 3 years of solo development part-time (2 to 3 days a week) - https://onlinecoursehost.com I would love for you guys to go through the landing page and give me your feedback on the page itself, the idea, the pricing model, any feedback would be much appreciated. About the product, it's an online course hosting platform. Online instructors upload their video courses, integrate with Stripe, set a price, create a course landing page and website home page (there is a website builder component to…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 10

I am very new to this. I have tried to follow to follow your guidelines, but I'm not sure if I have got it right. The URL point to release notes which give a brief overview of the project including its history. As production code, this is still early stage - but I think it works well enough to be useful to people other than myself.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11LL
I've been developing SpiderFoot (an OSINT/recon tool) for 10 years now, so wanted to share my story and try to distill some lessons learned in the hope they might be helpful to others here who might be considering writing/open-sourcing their own tools. Here's the post: https://medium.com/@micallst/lessons-learned-from-my-10-year-open-source-project-4a4c8c2b4f64 And the repo if you want to check it out: https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot -- TL;DR version of lessons from the post.. Lesson 1: Writing open source software can be very…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 12
Loopn▲7Hey, Hackers! I am incredibly excited to finally share what we've been building: Loopn. For years, my professional networking experience felt more like a chore than an opportunity. I’m sure many of you can relate. My feed became a constant firehose of noise—off-topic posts, viral debates, and endless content that had little to do with my actual career goals. The very platforms that promised connection were paradoxically making it harder to find the right people. It felt like finding a meaningful connection required sifting through a mountain of this irrelevant content. We were all just…
2025 · loopn.io · its alternatives →
- 13IW
Hello! This ebook aims to teach Linux command line tools and Shell Scripting for beginner to intermediate level users. The main focus is towards managing your files and performing text processing tasks. Includes plenty of examples, exercises (200+) and solutions. To celebrate my latest ebook release, you can download PDF/EPUB versions of Computing from the Command Line for FREE till 08-Nov-2022: https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_computing (the web version linked as the post url is always free) All books bundle (all my 13 programming ebooks) is $10 (normal…
2022 · learnbyexample.github.io · its alternatives →
- 14

I loved this recent "Show and Tell" thread about side projects posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343 It inspired me to build a mini directory that aggregates over 500 side projects posted to HN since 2017. You can filter by year, category, or revenue level. Thank you Cursor + Next.js for making this insanely fun to build. Hopefully you discover hidden gems or find inspiration in what the HN community is creating. Happy browsing!
2024 · hnsideprojects.com · its alternatives →
- 15IC
I spent the past week implementing a 1 Layer Neural Net and training it on MNIST within the visual scripting language provided by scratch.mit.edu. It was tedious, but ultimately not too difficult. The code runs incredibly slowly, so much so that 64 samples of MNIST takes 5+ hours to train on my machine. There were a lot of little mini challenges that were fun to overcome (implementing softmax was very tricky). If you're interested, I encourage you to try and improve on it! More details in the linked blog post.
2024 · bell-boy.github.io · its alternatives →
- 16AM
First, I'm by no mean a programmer. Second, I am reading HN for years, just registered to make this public and see if it can be useful for someone. I have nothing to gain monetary. A while ago, I decided that no blogging system was simple enough and I looked for a small wiki to use as a CMS/blog. Found WikWiki on C2.com and I mixed it with some basic Markdown syntax, a minimal template and added password protection. The result is a single php file, no database and no dependencies. Code is a mess, not modulable, probably wrong in so many ways, but it can probably used by some as personal…
2022 · mindwi.se · its alternatives →
- 17

Here's a video of it in action https://twitter.com/i/status/1667355251773526016 I didn't end up using it that much back then and no one else seems to have cared it existed, but it was a project I used to derust my programming skills and I'm to this day proud of the flamboyant design. To anyone reading this: you don't have to let your old code rot away in the graveyard of distant memories just because times change. With enough persistence and a little perseverance anything is possible. Code doesn't have an expiration date. -day
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18

Read an article yesterday about the H.264 codec increasing their licensing fee by an astronomical amount. And as always, my first shot was how hard could it be to try and build a codec which could be that efficient. I've personally been on a drive to improve my ability to one-shot complex features, products, or make even surgical changes. It's been a few months since I've been doing that, and honestly, results have been great for both work and work/life balance. This was a fun experiment. It burned through tokens, but it helped me identify some more improvements I could make to my…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19MP
My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.
2022 · petersaxton.uk · its alternatives →
- 20LA
Hello HN, I am building a devtool to understand existing codebases. The idea originates from my time at big tech as well as various attempts to get involved in open source projects. When I was in college I wanted to improve my coding skills by contributing to opensource projects. I would pickup a bug or feature request but I always found myself stuck at the very first step. I did not understood where and how to begin contributing. I once submitted a patch in firefox which was labeled "Good first issue" but that was still very handheld. The assigner told me exactly which files I need to…
2024 · lucidcode.ai · its alternatives →
- 21IB
Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 22HP
Hey everyone, I've been experimenting with collaborative learning and active learning for a while (I launched Coderoulette a couple of months ago) and I'm launching something new today that I'm really excited about. Online learning is pretty passive (video lectures) and lonely, and I think we could create an online learning experience much engaging and effective than that. Only 5% of people who start a Coursera course finish it. My hypothesis is that we can increase that number significantly by matching learners online in teams of 2-3 and giving them a real project to build together. On top…
2016 · its alternatives →
- 23

I have been interested in neural nets since the 90's. I've done quite a bit of reading, but never gotten around to writing code. I used Gemini in place of Wikipedia to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. The coolest part of this was learning about dual numbers. You can see in early commits that I did not yet know about auto-diff; I was thinking I'd have to integrate a CAS library or something. Now, I'm off to play with TensorFlow.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24IM
TLDR: I'm building an experimental open source/open data thing to collect good lecture recordings website: https://lectures.koljasam.com/ repo: github.com/koljapluemer/awesome-lectures Hi everyone, this submission is my attempt to contribute something to the question of how we will find, share and evaluate information in the future, in the face of the many problems that I think HN is well-aware of (slob, search engines returning SEO garbage or corporate stuff, spam, trust problems, big companies eating everything,...). I was specifically inspired by recent…
Apr 2026 · 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 →