Full graphical desktop running on a 128MB VPS Alpine+XRDP+WindowMaker
This idea has been floating in my head for about 10 years. Some of you might remember LowEndSpirit.com back before it became a forum, I started that. I've been obsessed with making tiny, cheap VPS actually useful ever since. TierHive is my attempt to make 128MB VPS great again :) It's a NAT VPS (KVM) platform with true hourly billing. Spin up a server, use it for 3 hours, delete it, pay for 3 hours. No monthly commitments, no minimums beyond a $5 top-up. The tradeoff is NAT (no dedicated IPv4), but I've tried to make that less painful: - Every account gets a /24 private subnet with full…
Full graphical desktop running on a 128MB VPS Alpine+XRDP+WindowMaker launched on March 26, 2026 with 9 votes, #1,237 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
TierHive - The cheapest NAT VPS hosting per hour with instant deployment, hourly billing, and global distribution, your homelab or dev environment in the cloud, offload your databases, email and compute. Network-first NAT Hourly VPS: your own /24 meshed globally—VPS across regions talk like a LAN. Adjust RAM/disk/priority anytime. 2 forwarded ports per VPS. Free HAProxy + SSL. Email relay, DB offloading, and 1-click recipe system for instant multi-VPS deployments. 1hr minimum, from $0.000135
Alpine minimal remote desktop on a 128mb VPS
This guide adds a functional graphical desktop to the minimised Alpine 3.23 system built in the previous guide. Every command has been run on a real instance and the results recorded. This guide assumes the minimised Alpine 3.23 base from the previous guide. https://tierhive.com/blog/tierhive-howto/how-to-run-alpine-with-just-23mb-ram Starting from a stock Alpine install may produce different results. Minimum RAM: 128MB. The desktop stack consumes around 58MB with a session active. total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 91 23 51 0 17 62 Swap: 0 0 0 Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/vda 953.0M 71.9M 834.1M 8% / Choices made Remote access: XRDP. RDP is natively…from tierhive.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
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Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines2025 · github.com · ▲144hey 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.
I replaced Grafana+Prometheus with a Go binary and SSH for my VPSsFeb 2026 · github.com · ▲11I do fullstack dev for work and side projects and recently moved everything to a couple VPSs on hetzner. Great setup, low cost, but one thing kept bugging me, how do I know if something is down without manually sshing in all the time? I tried the grafana + prometheus stack but the configuration time and seeing it use more resources than my actual apps was rough. Tried some smaller solutions too but nothing felt right. So I said screw it and built exactly what I wanted. tori is a single go binary that runs on your server, reads host metrics from /proc and /sys, monitors containers…
Numax - a portable runtime for distributed appsJun 2026 · github.com · ▲6Hi, 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…
- I made StarDesk, P2P low latency remote desktop built for game and workJan 2026 · stardesk.net · ▲6
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…
We built a <60ms, open-source alternative to E2B using RustVMM and KVMApr 2026 · github.com · ▲7Over 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,…
wsgrokJan 2026 · wsgrok.com · ▲7I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.
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