Open-source operating-systems software
1492 open-source libraries, tools and applications tagged operating-systems, ranked by how closely operating-systems is their primary purpose, then by adoption and maintenance health. Each entry links to a page with sources, use cases and when to choose or avoid it.
1492 products, primary matches first, then adoption-weighted; health v2 shown.
| Product | Health v2 | Stars | Maturity |
|---|---|---|---|
| ubuntu/lightdm LightDM is a lightweight, cross-desktop display manager daemon that runs display servers (X, Wayland, Mir), presents greeters for user logi… | 96 | 1012 | stable |
| winblues/blue95 Blue95 is a Fedora Atomic-based Xfce desktop Linux distribution themed with Chicago95 to evoke a Windows 95-era computing experience. It is… | 63 | 1012 | active |
| Parallels/vagrant-parallels An official Vagrant provider plugin that lets Vagrant manage Parallels Desktop for Mac virtual machines on macOS hosts. It supports core Va… | 76 | 1011 | active |
| yc9559/uperf Uperf is a userspace performance controller for Android that dynamically tunes CPU frequencies, thread affinity, and other sysfs parameters… | 23 | 3417 | maintenance |
| mitnk/cicada Cicada is a bash-like Unix shell written in Rust that supports pipelines, redirections, command substitution, job control, completion, and … | 92 | 1006 | active |
| nwg-piotr/nwg-look nwg-look is a GTK3 settings editor designed for wlroots-based Wayland environments like sway. It applies gsettings directly without Xwaylan… | 84 | 1006 | active |
| Jaysce/Spaceman Spaceman is a native macOS menu bar app that displays your Spaces / Virtual Desktops, showing which space is active across one or more disp… | 49 | 1005 | active |
| evansm7/vftool vftool is a minimalist command-line wrapper around Apple's macOS Virtualization.framework for running Linux virtual machines. It sets up VM… | 32 | 1005 | active |
| kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic Background Music is a macOS audio utility that runs as a system audio device, offering per-application volume control, automatic pausing of… | 72 | 19348 | experimental |
| lgaches/BeaconEmitter BeaconEmitter is a macOS application that turns a Mac into an iBeacon emitter, broadcasting its presence to nearby Bluetooth Low Energy (BL… | 23 | 998 | active |
| peng-zhihui/Project-Quantum An open-source hardware and software project for a super-mini modular Linux card computer, built from stamp-hole PCB modules (Quark-Core AR… | 32 | 3314 | maintenance |
| cryinkfly/Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux A shell-based installer that runs Autodesk Fusion 360 on Linux using Wine, with support for many distributions and graphics drivers. The Gi… | 10 | 3280 | maintenance |
| jwise/HoRNDIS HoRNDIS is a macOS kernel extension (kext) driver that enables Android USB tethering, letting a Mac use an Android phone's native tethering… | 23 | 3261 | maintenance |
| reactos/reactos ReactOS is a free, open-source operating system written from scratch that is binary-compatible with applications and drivers written for th… | 86 | 18242 | experimental |
| hirschmann/nbfc NoteBook FanControl (NBFC) is a cross-platform fan control service for laptops, written in C# and running on Windows and Linux via .NET/Mon… | 23 | 3229 | maintenance |
| plasma-umass/browsix Browsix is a JavaScript framework that brings Unix-like abstractions—processes, pipes, signals, sockets, and a shared file system—to the br… | 32 | 3184 | maintenance |
| fancycode/MemoryModule A C library that loads Windows DLLs entirely from memory without writing them to disk, bypassing the filesystem-only limitation of LoadLibr… | 32 | 3159 | maintenance |
| tiann/FreeReflection FreeReflection is an Android library that removes the reflection restrictions introduced in Android P (and later), letting apps use hidden/… | 23 | 3157 | maintenance |
| saminiir/level-ip A userspace TCP/IP stack for Linux implemented in C using TUN/TAP devices, with an accompanying blog series explaining Ethernet, ARP, IPv4,… | 32 | 3135 | maintenance |
| yujitach/MenuMeters A fork of the classic MenuMeters macOS utility that displays CPU, memory, disk, and network usage monitors in the menu bar. It runs as a st… | 23 | 3081 | maintenance |
| intoli/exodus Exodus is a Python CLI tool that relocates Linux ELF binaries by bundling them with all of their shared library dependencies, without using… | 32 | 3012 | maintenance |
| eddiezane/lunchy Lunchy is a friendly Ruby-based wrapper around macOS's launchctl that simplifies managing launchd agents with simple commands like start, s… | 32 | 3002 | maintenance |
| deanishe/alfred-workflow A Python helper library for authors of Alfred 2/3/4 workflows on macOS. It handles feedback JSON generation, fuzzy filtering, caching, sett… | 23 | 2962 | maintenance |
| whomwah/qlstephen QLStephen is a macOS QuickLook plugin that lets you preview plain text files without a file extension, such as README, INSTALL, CHANGELOG, … | 23 | 2835 | maintenance |
| ch11ng/exwm EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) turns Emacs into a full X11 window manager, allowing users to manage X windows as Emacs buffers. This origina… | 23 | 2822 | maintenance |
| helmuthdu/aui A set of shell scripts (FIFO and LILO) that automate the installation and configuration of Arch Linux, from partitioning and base system in… | 32 | 2816 | maintenance |
| zodiacon/WindowsInternals Source code for custom tools written by Pavel Yosifovich and Alex Ionescu to accompany the Windows Internals 7th edition book. The tools de… | 23 | 2795 | maintenance |
| minoca/os Minoca OS is a general-purpose operating system written from scratch in C, featuring a POSIX-like interface, an event-driven preemptive SMP… | 32 | 2792 | maintenance |
| odlp/bluesnooze Bluesnooze is a macOS menu bar utility that automatically switches Bluetooth off when your Mac sleeps and back on when it wakes. It prevent… | 23 | 2687 | maintenance |
| everdox/InfinityHook InfinityHook is a Windows kernel library that hooks system calls, context switches, page faults, and DPCs by abusing ETW trace mechanics, r… | 32 | 2679 | maintenance |
| betterlockscreen/betterlockscreen Betterlockscreen is a shell-based lockscreen utility for Linux that wraps i3lock to provide fast, visually appealing lock screens with imag… | 47 | 2650 | maintenance |
| AlessandroZ/BeRoot BeRoot is a post-exploitation tool that checks common misconfigurations on Windows, Linux, and macOS hosts to identify potential privilege … | 23 | 2624 | maintenance |
| geerlingguy/macos-virtualbox-vm A shell script and set of instructions for creating a bootable macOS installer ISO and running macOS in a VirtualBox virtual machine. It au… | 32 | 2579 | maintenance |
| mit-pdos/biscuit Biscuit is a research operating system kernel written in Go for x86-64 CPUs, implementing a monolithic POSIX-subset kernel with garbage col… | 32 | 2577 | maintenance |
| medusalix/xone A Linux kernel driver for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S accessories, implementing Microsoft's Game Input Protocol (GIP) as a modern replacem… | 45 | 2533 | maintenance |
| probonopd/linuxdeployqt linuxdeployqt is a Linux deployment tool that makes applications self-contained by copying in the libraries and plugins they use, producing… | 45 | 2471 | maintenance |
| unetbootin/unetbootin UNetbootin is a cross-platform GUI application that creates bootable Live USB drives for Linux and BSD distributions. It can automatically … | 23 | 2461 | maintenance |
| Bismuth-Forge/bismuth Bismuth is a KDE Plasma add-on (KWin script) that automatically tiles windows and enables keyboard-driven window management, similar to i3,… | 10 | 2419 | maintenance |
| ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard A small C wrapper program (reattach-to-user-namespace) plus documentation that fixes broken Mac OS X pasteboard (pbcopy/pbpaste) access ins… | 32 | 2397 | maintenance |
| nix-community/nixos-generators A collection of Nix-based image builders that generate NixOS system images in many formats (ISO, qcow2, cloud provider images, containers, … | 10 | 2396 | maintenance |
| Kintaro/wtftw wtftw is a tiling window manager for X11 written in Rust, inspired by xmonad. It is configured via a Rust config file and supports multiple… | 32 | 2375 | maintenance |
| icexin/eggos Eggos is a unikernel written almost entirely in Go that runs Go applications directly on x86 bare metal, supporting Go features like GC, go… | 23 | 2328 | maintenance |
| seb-m/pyinotify Pyinotify is a Python library for monitoring filesystem events on Linux using the kernel's inotify subsystem. It wraps the inotify system c… | 32 | 2304 | maintenance |
| solus-project/budgie-desktop Budgie Desktop is a feature-rich, elegant desktop environment for Linux, originally developed for the Solus distribution, featuring a panel… | 23 | 2299 | maintenance |
| chjj/compton Compton is a lightweight standalone X11 compositor forked from xcompmgr-dana, written in C. It adds window effects like shadows, transparen… | 23 | 2262 | maintenance |
| ldpreload/BlackLotus An open-source UEFI bootkit targeting Windows that implements a Secure Boot bypass, kernel-level persistence, and an HTTP-based C2 loader w… | 29 | 2247 | maintenance |
| abba23/spotify-adblock A Spotify adblocker for Linux implemented as a shared library that wraps cef_urlrequest_create and blocks requests to denylisted URLs via L… | 87 | 2241 | maintenance |
| zackelia/bclm BCLM is a Swift command-line utility that reads and writes battery charge level max (BCLM/CHWA) values to the SMC on Intel and Apple silico… | 42 | 2188 | maintenance |
| Jas-SinghFSU/HyprPanel HyprPanel is a highly customizable bar/panel for the Hyprland Wayland compositor, built with AGS/Astal and GJS (TypeScript). It provides sy… | 10 | 2186 | maintenance |
| esjeon/krohnkite Kröhnkite is a dynamic tiling extension for KWin, the KDE window manager, inspired by dwm. It automatically tiles windows while integrating… | 23 | 2183 | maintenance |
| Pyroh/Fluor Fluor is a macOS menu bar application that automatically switches the behavior of the keyboard's Fn keys (Apple function keys vs. standard … | 23 | 2179 | maintenance |
| glibc Alpine Compatibility Package A prebuilt GNU C Library (glibc) compatibility layer packaged as an Alpine Linux apk package. It lets binaries linked against glibc run on … | 23 | 2170 | maintenance |
| apple/cups Apple CUPS is the standards-based open source printing system shipped with macOS and iOS, built on the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). It… | 10 | 2167 | maintenance |
| dylanaraps/pfetch pfetch is a pretty system information display tool written entirely in POSIX sh, showing OS, kernel, uptime, packages, memory, and more alo… | 10 | 2158 | maintenance |
| ilikenwf/apt-fast apt-fast is a shell script wrapper around apt-get and aptitude that speeds up package downloads by fetching packages in parallel with multi… | 62 | 2155 | maintenance |
| ChristianKienle/Core-Data-Editor A macOS application for viewing, editing, and analyzing Core Data stores used by Mac and iOS applications. It supports XML, SQLite, and bin… | 23 | 2128 | maintenance |
| maruos/maruos Maru OS is an open-source Android-based operating system that turns your smartphone into a desktop PC when connected to an external display… | 68 | 2123 | maintenance |
| corellium/projectsandcastle A collection of supporting tools for running Android/Linux on the iPhone, including a kernel loader via pongoOS, a syscfg partition extract… | 32 | 2113 | maintenance |
| omnirom/android_bootable_recovery Team Win Recovery Project (TWRP), a custom touch-based recovery image for Android devices, maintained under the OmniROM project. It allows … | 32 | 2093 | maintenance |
| lukechilds/dockerpi A Docker image that boots a full virtualised ARM Raspberry Pi running Raspbian via QEMU. It supports Pi 1 by default with experimental Pi 2… | 32 | 2045 | maintenance |
| ionescu007/SimpleVisor SimpleVisor is a minimal, portable Intel VT-x hypervisor written in about 500 lines of C and 10 lines of assembly, supporting dynamic hyper… | 32 | 2013 | maintenance |
| keeferrourke/la-capitaine-icon-theme La Capitaine is an SVG-based icon pack for Linux desktop environments, inspired by macOS and Google's Material Design. It ships with a conf… | 23 | 1996 | maintenance |
| h3xduck/TripleCross TripleCross is a Linux eBPF rootkit demonstrating offensive capabilities of eBPF technology, including library injection, execution hijacki… | 23 | 1986 | maintenance |
| macchina Macchina is a fast, minimal, and customizable command-line system information fetcher written in Rust. It displays details like kernel vers… | 35 | 1984 | maintenance |
| takama/daemon A Go library that lets services install and manage themselves as system daemons across Linux (systemd, SysV, Upstart), macOS (launchd), and… | 23 | 1978 | maintenance |
| jondonas/linux-exploit-suggester-2 A Perl script that suggests Linux kernel privilege escalation exploits based on the running kernel version. It matches the kernel release a… | 32 | 1973 | maintenance |
| 9fans/plan9port Plan 9 from User Space (plan9port) is a port of many Plan 9 libraries and programs from their native Plan 9 environment to Unix-like operat… | 73 | 1964 | maintenance |
| kfix/ddcctl A macOS command-line utility for controlling external monitors via DDC/CI, supporting brightness, contrast, input source, and other monitor… | 23 | 1957 | maintenance |
| Hexxeh/rpi-update A shell script tool for updating the firmware and kernel of a Raspberry Pi to the latest bleeding-edge builds. It is now deprecated in favo… | 32 | 1936 | maintenance |
| retep998/winapi-rs winapi-rs is a Rust crate providing raw FFI bindings to the Windows API, hand-gathered from the Windows 10 SDK. It is a no-op on non-Window… | 32 | 1930 | maintenance |
| tiann/Leoric Leoric is a proof-of-concept Android library that demonstrates a technique for keeping an app process alive against force-stop kills on And… | 32 | 1923 | maintenance |
| Axarva/dotfiles-2.0 A collection of Linux desktop configuration files (dotfiles) centered on the XMonad tiling window manager with Eww desktop widgets, rofi, a… | 32 | 1921 | maintenance |
| Codeux-Software/Textual Textual is a highly customizable IRC client for macOS, supporting IRCv3, OTR encryption, and styling via CSS/HTML/JavaScript. It can be ext… | 77 | 1918 | maintenance |
| bayasdev/envycontrol EnvyControl is a Python CLI tool for switching GPU modes (integrated, hybrid, dedicated) on Nvidia Optimus laptops under Linux. It manages … | 10 | 1889 | maintenance |
| ChrisTitusTech/ArchTitus ArchTitus is a shell-based automated installer for Arch Linux that sets up a full system with a chosen desktop environment and configuratio… | 10 | 1883 | maintenance |
| novastone-media/MQTT-Client-Framework A native Objective-C MQTT client framework for iOS, macOS, and tvOS built on CFNetwork with CoreData persistence. It fully implements MQTT … | 23 | 1880 | maintenance |
| Raspberry Pi FBTFT Firmware FBTFT is a collection of Linux kernel framebuffer drivers for small TFT LCD display modules, making it easy to write drivers for these disp… | 10 | 1878 | maintenance |
| mrworf/plexupdate A bash script that automates keeping Plex Media Server up to date on Linux, including downloading and installing Plex Pass beta releases. I… | 32 | 1875 | maintenance |
| Vagrant Manager Vagrant Manager is an OS X status bar menu application for managing all Vagrant virtual machines from one central location. It auto-detects… | 23 | 1862 | maintenance |
| Kevin-De-Koninck/Clean-Me Clean Me is an open-source macOS application that analyses disk usage across common cache, log, and temporary directories and offers option… | 10 | 1848 | maintenance |
| arkane-systems/genie Genie is a command-line utility that runs a systemd 'bottle' inside WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), letting users start and enter a name… | 10 | 1846 | maintenance |
| kbumsik/VirtScreen VirtScreen is a Linux GUI application that creates a virtual secondary display using XRandR and shares it over VNC, letting you use an iPad… | 23 | 1839 | maintenance |
| Pavo-IM/OC-Gen-X A macOS GUI utility that generates OpenCore EFI folders and config.plist files for desktop Hackintosh systems. It produces pre-defined conf… | 23 | 1827 | maintenance |
| InteliSecureLabs/Linux_Exploit_Suggester A Perl script that suggests possible Linux kernel exploits based on the operating system release number (uname -r). It matches the kernel v… | 32 | 1812 | maintenance |
| s-macke/jor1k jor1k is an OpenRISC 1000 (and RISC-V) CPU emulator written in JavaScript that boots and runs Linux entirely in a web browser. It supports … | 51 | 1801 | maintenance |
| opsengine/cpulimit Cpulimit is a command-line tool that limits the CPU usage percentage of a process by sending SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals, without changing … | 32 | 1778 | maintenance |
| lwfinger/rtl8188eu A stand-alone out-of-tree Linux kernel driver for Realtek RTL8188EU USB Wi-Fi adapters. It is built from source with make against installed… | 32 | 1770 | maintenance |
| paradoxxxzero/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet A GNOME Shell extension that displays system information such as CPU usage, memory usage, and network rates directly in the GNOME Shell sta… | 24 | 1765 | maintenance |
| tandasat/HyperPlatform HyperPlatform is an Intel VT-x based hypervisor for Windows that provides a thin VM-exit filtering platform for research. It lets researche… | 10 | 1760 | maintenance |
| rtl88x2bu driver An out-of-tree Linux kernel driver for Realtek rtl88x2bu USB Wi-Fi adapters, updated from Realtek's vendor source to build against current … | 74 | 1756 | maintenance |
| Lord-Kamina/SwiftDefaultApps A macOS System Preferences pane for viewing and changing default application associations for URI schemes and file types (UTIs). It is a mo… | 67 | 1752 | maintenance |
| queer/boxxy boxxy is a Rust-based Linux CLI tool that uses namespaces to sandbox misbehaving applications and redirect their file reads/writes to speci… | 46 | 1748 | maintenance |
| meefik/busybox An Android application that installs BusyBox, a single small executable combining tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities, onto a roote… | 23 | 1747 | maintenance |
| gnab/rtl8812au A Linux kernel driver for Realtek rtl8812au-based 802.11ac dual-band USB wireless adapters, forked from Realtek's v4.2.2 source and patched… | 32 | 1745 | maintenance |
| georgewhewell/undervolt A Python CLI tool for undervolting Intel CPUs under Linux by writing voltage offsets to MSR 0x150, similar to ThrottleStop on Windows. It c… | 32 | 1743 | maintenance |
| bazil.org/fuse bazil.org/fuse is a Go library for writing FUSE userspace filesystems. It implements the kernel-userspace FUSE communication protocol from … | 32 | 1738 | maintenance |
| microsoft/WSL-DistroLauncher A C++ reference implementation of a launcher app required for packaging custom Linux distributions as WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) Mic… | 10 | 1733 | maintenance |
| brektrou/rtl8821CU An out-of-tree Linux kernel driver for Realtek RTL8811CU/RTL8821CU USB Wi-Fi adapters, written in C. It supports DKMS-based automatic rebui… | 32 | 1724 | maintenance |
| foniod/redbpf RedBPF is a Rust eBPF toolchain consisting of libraries and a cargo subcommand for writing, building, and loading eBPF programs. It provide… | 10 | 1719 | maintenance |
| tomaspinho/rtl8821ce A Linux kernel module driver for the Realtek RTL8821CE PCIe Wi-Fi chipset, installable via DKMS. It was developed primarily for Arch Linux … | 10 | 1715 | maintenance |