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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| winfsp/winfsp WinFsp is a Windows platform providing a kernel-mode file system driver and user-mode DLL that lets developers implement custom file system… | 66 | 8934 | stable |
| java-native-access/jna Java Native Access (JNA) is a Java library that lets Java programs call native shared libraries (C/C++) using only Java code, without writi… | 77 | 8927 | stable |
| Clipy/Clipy Clipy is an open-source clipboard extension app for macOS that keeps a history of copied text and images, accessible via customizable keybo… | 91 | 8914 | active |
| insidegui/VirtualBuddy VirtualBuddy is a free, open-source macOS application that virtualizes macOS 12 and later on Apple Silicon Macs, with a GUI for creating an… | 95 | 8826 | active |
| adi1090x/rofi A large collection of Rofi-based custom applets, launchers, and power menus written in shell scripts. It provides ready-made themes and men… | 67 | 8812 | active |
| RROrg/rr RR (Redpill Recovery) is a preinstallation and recovery bootloader environment that lets users boot Synology DSM on arbitrary x86/x64 hardw… | 90 | 8624 | active |
| XcodesOrg/XcodesApp Xcodes.app is a native macOS application built with Swift/SwiftUI for installing and switching between multiple versions of Xcode with a mo… | 96 | 8584 | active |
| CotEditor CotEditor is a lightweight, open-source plain text editor built natively for macOS using Swift and Cocoa. It offers syntax highlighting for… | 99 | 8569 | active |
| brndnmtthws/conky Conky is a lightweight, highly configurable system monitor that displays system statistics and other information directly on your desktop. … | 100 | 8535 | active |
| archlinux/archinstall A guided and automated installer for Arch Linux that can run interactively or from declarative JSON configuration files and templates. It a… | 99 | 8501 | active |
| DankMaterialShell DankMaterialShell is a complete desktop shell for Wayland compositors built with Quickshell (QML) and a Go backend. It replaces the usual p… | 82 | 8499 | active |
| htop-dev/htop htop is a cross-platform interactive process viewer for the terminal, written in C and requiring ncurses. It lets users scroll, sort, filte… | 91 | 8393 | stable |
| TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher AppImageLauncher is a helper application for Linux distributions that acts as an entry point for running and integrating AppImages. It inte… | 65 | 8327 | active |
| bspwm bspwm is a tiling window manager for X11 that arranges windows as leaves of a full binary tree using binary space partitioning. It handles … | 68 | 8324 | stable |
| Sysdig Sysdig is a Linux system exploration and troubleshooting tool that captures system calls and OS events at the kernel level, with native sup… | 72 | 8301 | active |
| FEX-Emu/FEX FEX is a fast usermode x86 and x86-64 emulator for ARM64 Linux, using an advanced binary recompiler with a custom IR to run 32-bit and 64-b… | 99 | 8299 | active |
| iStoreOS iStoreOS is an entry-level router and NAS operating system based on OpenWrt, adapted to multiple hardware platforms. It provides a beginner… | 77 | 8153 | active |
| PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme Papirus is a free and open source SVG icon theme for Linux, based on the Paper Icon Set, with thousands of pixel-perfect icons for apps, ac… | 83 | 8103 | active |
| mmulet/term.everything A Linux CLI tool that renders any GUI application window inside a terminal, working on both X11 and Wayland. It supports rendering over SSH… | 53 | 8097 | active |
| Omakub Omakub is an opinionated shell-based setup script that turns a fresh Ubuntu 24.04+ installation into a fully configured web development env… | 10 | 8084 | active |
| APatch APatch is a kernel-based root solution for Android devices that patches the Android kernel and system, relying on KernelPatch. It supports … | 83 | 8021 | active |
| maharmstone/btrfs WinBtrfs is an open-source Btrfs filesystem driver for Windows, reimplemented from scratch in C with no Linux kernel code. It supports read… | 84 | 7857 | active |
| luchina-gabriel/OSX-PROXMOX A shell-based installer that sets up OpenCore boot and macOS VM support on Proxmox VE hosts, enabling macOS installation on AMD and Intel h… | 77 | 7846 | active |
| linux-surface/linux-surface A patched Linux kernel and associated packages that add hardware support for Microsoft Surface devices not yet available in upstream kernel… | 96 | 7816 | active |
| boltgolt/howdy Howdy provides Windows Hello-style facial authentication for Linux using IR emitters and a camera with facial recognition. It integrates wi… | 34 | 7813 | active |
| AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq auto-cpufreq is an automatic CPU speed and power optimizer for Linux that monitors battery state, CPU usage, temperature, and system load t… | 90 | 7807 | active |
| raycast/extensions The official monorepo of all extensions available in the Raycast Store, plus documentation and templates for building Raycast extensions wi… | 77 | 7792 | active |
| PostgresApp/PostgresApp Postgres.app is a full-featured PostgreSQL installation packaged as a standard macOS application with a native GUI for starting and stoppin… | 90 | 7783 | active |
| SuperManito/LinuxMirrors A one-line shell script for switching system software package sources on 27+ GNU/Linux distributions, plus a companion script for installin… | 74 | 7775 | active |
| thebookisclosed/ViVe ViVe is a C# library and console tool (ViVeTool) for interacting with the A/B feature experiment mechanism in Windows 10 version 2004 and n… | 24 | 7773 | active |
| netblue30/firejail Firejail is a SUID security sandbox program for Linux that uses kernel namespaces, seccomp-bpf filters, and Linux capabilities to run appli… | 79 | 7688 | active |
| fairyglade/ly Ly is a lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD, written in Zig. It handles graphical login sessions via PAM and w… | 67 | 7625 | active |
| OpCore Simplify OpCore Simplify is a Python-based tool that automates the creation of OpenCore EFI folders for Hackintosh systems. It detects hardware, che… | 69 | 7595 | active |
| jart/blink Blink is a tiny x86-64 Linux user-mode emulator written in C that runs x86-64-linux binaries on other operating systems and architectures, … | 44 | 7595 | active |
| Sequel-Ace/Sequel-Ace Sequel Ace is a fast, easy-to-use native macOS application for managing MySQL and MariaDB databases, serving as the successor to Sequel Pro… | 99 | 7555 | active |
| home-assistant/operating-system Home Assistant Operating System is a Buildroot-based Linux distribution optimized to run Home Assistant and its add-ons via Docker containe… | 94 | 7537 | active |
| yuk7/ArchWSL ArchWSL is an Arch Linux distribution packaged for Windows Subsystem for Linux, built on the wsldl launcher. It lets users install and run … | 63 | 7398 | active |
| julienXX/terminal-notifier terminal-notifier is a command-line tool for sending macOS User Notifications from the terminal. It ships as an app bundle and supports opt… | 94 | 7360 | active |
| ilyamiro/serpantinum Serpantinum is a desktop shell for Wayland compositors, built in QML, evolving from the author's popular dotfiles configuration. It provide… | 84 | 7339 | active |
| Intel Wi-Fi for macOS (itlwm + HeliPort) itlwm is an open-source kernel extension providing Intel Wi-Fi adapter support on macOS, ported largely from OpenBSD's iwm/iwx/net80211 dri… | 23 | 7107 | active |
| milanvarady/Applite Applite is a free, open-source native macOS GUI app for managing third-party applications via Homebrew Casks, designed for non-technical us… | 87 | 7053 | active |
| Ji4n1ng/OpenInTerminal A macOS Finder toolbar app that opens the current directory in terminal emulators like Terminal, iTerm, Hyper, Alacritty, and many others, … | 88 | 7029 | active |
| openmediavault openmediavault is a network attached storage (NAS) operating system solution based on Debian Linux, providing a web-based administration in… | 77 | 7010 | active |
| Awesome awesome is a highly configurable, framework-style tiling window manager for X11, written in C and configured/extended with Lua. It is fast … | 64 | 6968 | stable |
| newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake KeepingYouAwake is a small macOS menu bar utility that prevents your Mac from going to sleep, either for a predefined duration or indefinit… | 66 | 6932 | stable |
| klange/toaruos ToaruOS is a complete, independent hobby operating system for x86-64 PCs and ARMv8 VM environments, built entirely from original code with … | 92 | 6863 | active |
| COSMIC Desktop Environment COSMIC is a next-generation desktop environment for Linux built in Rust by System76, composed of modular components including a Wayland com… | 97 | 6839 | active |
| bitgapp/eqMac eqMac is a macOS system-wide audio equalizer and volume mixer application built with Swift and CoreAudio. It provides bass/mid/treble and m… | 92 | 6805 | active |
| microsoft/MS-DOS MS-DOS is the original source code of Microsoft Disk Operating System versions 1.25, 2.0, and 4.0, released for reference under the MIT lic… | 10 | 32273 | maintenance |
| LumaTeam/Luma3DS Luma3DS is custom firmware for the Nintendo 3DS family of consoles that patches and reimplements parts of the system software. It adds home… | 81 | 6789 | active |
| xrdp xrdp is an open-source RDP server that provides graphical login to remote Linux machines using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol. It ac… | 88 | 6733 | stable |
| opa334/Dopamine Dopamine is a rootless semi-untethered jailbreak tool for iOS 15 through 26.0.1, supporting arm64e and A12/A13 devices. It is written prima… | 96 | 6723 | active |
| google/perfetto Perfetto is an open-source suite of SDKs, daemons, and tools for production-grade system profiling, app tracing, and trace analysis on clie… | 93 | 6647 | stable |
| The-Z-Labs/linux-exploit-suggester A shell-based auditing tool that assesses a Linux system's exposure to publicly known kernel privilege escalation exploits based on kernel … | 62 | 6626 | active |
| SukiSU-Ultra/SukiSU-Ultra SukiSU-Ultra is a kernel-based Android root solution providing kernel-level su and root access management, with support for KPM kernel modu… | 88 | 6601 | active |
| palera1n palera1n is an open-source jailbreak tool for Apple devices using the checkm8 bootrom exploit, supporting A8 through A11 chips and T2 secur… | 89 | 6528 | active |
| Tock OS Tock is an embedded operating system for low-power, low-memory microcontrollers that runs multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applica… | 88 | 6467 | active |
| microsoft/Detours Microsoft Detours is a C++ library for intercepting, monitoring, and instrumenting Win32 API calls on Windows via function hooking and bina… | 64 | 6384 | stable |
| google/syzkaller syzkaller is an unsupervised coverage-guided kernel fuzzer originally built for the Linux kernel and now supporting FreeBSD, Fuchsia, gViso… | 77 | 6352 | active |
| TianoCore EDK II EDK II is TianoCore's open-source, cross-platform firmware development environment implementing the UEFI and PI specifications. It provides… | 88 | 6349 | active |
| nelhage/reptyr reptyr is a command-line utility that reparents an already-running process to a new terminal using ptrace. It lets you move long-running pr… | 52 | 6336 | active |
| DietPi DietPi is an extremely lightweight Debian-based Linux distribution optimised for minimal CPU and RAM usage on single-board computers (Raspb… | 98 | 6331 | stable |
| adi1090x/polybar-themes A large collection of ready-made themes for the Polybar status bar, offering many styles, colors, and variants for Linux desktop environmen… | 73 | 6253 | active |
| DominicBreuker/pspy pspy is a command line tool that snoops on Linux processes without root permissions by combining procfs scans with inotify watchers to catc… | 51 | 6211 | stable |
| dalance/procs procs is a modern replacement for the ps command, written in Rust, that shows process information with colored, human-readable output. It a… | 89 | 6195 | active |
| twostraws/ControlRoom Control Room is a macOS GUI application for controlling the Xcode Simulator for iOS, tvOS, and watchOS. It wraps Apple's simctl command-lin… | 62 | 6104 | active |
| Webmin Webmin is a mature web-based control panel for administering Unix-like servers, letting users manage users, disk quotas, services, config f… | 99 | 6095 | stable |
| tombonez/noTunes noTunes is a small macOS menu bar application that prevents iTunes or Apple Music from launching, for example when Bluetooth headphones rec… | 23 | 6095 | active |
| FeralInteractive/gamemode GameMode is a daemon and library combo for Linux that lets games request temporary system performance optimisations such as CPU governor ch… | 58 | 6043 | active |
| tonsky/AnyBar AnyBar is a small macOS menubar application that displays a colored dot whose meaning and color are controlled by the user. It is controlle… | 52 | 6041 | stable |
| nix-darwin/nix-darwin nix-darwin is a declarative configuration system for macOS built on Nix and Nixpkgs, similar to NixOS. It lets users define their entire ma… | 77 | 6006 | active |
| rvaiya/keyd keyd is a system-wide key remapping daemon for Linux that works at the kernel input level (evdev/uinput), independent of the display server… | 62 | 5990 | active |
| grassmunk/Chicago95 Chicago95 is a Windows 95-style total conversion theme for XFCE/Xubuntu on Linux, including GTK2/GTK3 themes, icons, an XFWM window manager… | 66 | 5965 | active |
| Dokany Dokany is a user-mode file system library for Windows, similar to FUSE on Linux, letting developers create file systems without writing ker… | 59 | 5954 | active |
| MrGlockenspiel/activate-linux A novelty desktop application that displays the Windows 'Activate Windows' watermark on Linux desktops, written in C using cairo. It suppor… | 77 | 5947 | active |
| 007revad/Synology_HDD_db A Shell script that adds user-installed HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe drives to Synology NAS compatible drive databases, bypassing DSM's drive compa… | 94 | 5881 | active |
| RIOT OS RIOT is an open-source, vendor-independent operating system for Internet of Things and embedded devices, supporting 8/16/32-bit microcontro… | 93 | 5820 | active |
| WebAssembly/WASI WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) is a set of standardized APIs that let WebAssembly modules access system resources like files, clocks, … | 91 | 5818 | active |
| seL4/seL4 seL4 is a formally verified microkernel operating system kernel written in C, providing high-assurance isolation and capability-based secur… | 85 | 5768 | active |
| ilya-zlobintsev/LACT LACT is a Linux application for controlling and monitoring AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs, offering overclocking, fan curves, power management… | 93 | 5761 | active |
| gnif/LookingGlass Looking Glass is an extremely low latency KVM FrameRelay (KVMFR) implementation that lets a Linux host display and interact with a Windows … | 67 | 5737 | active |
| ptitSeb/box64 Box64 is a Linux userspace emulator that lets you run x86_64 Linux programs, including games, on non-x86_64 systems such as ARM64, RISC-V, … | 86 | 5658 | active |
| nextai-translator/bob-plugin-openai-translator A Bob plugin for macOS that uses OpenAI, Google Gemini, MiniMax, or OpenAI-compatible APIs to translate text, polish wording, and fix gramm… | 93 | 5651 | active |
| Cinnamon Desktop Cinnamon is a Linux desktop environment providing a traditional desktop layout with modern technology, forked from GNOME Shell. It is the f… | 96 | 5625 | active |
| dunst-project/dunst Dunst is a lightweight, highly customizable notification daemon for Unix-like systems that implements the freedesktop notification specific… | 84 | 5605 | active |
| Raspberry Pi Firmware & Kernel The Raspberry Pi fork of the Linux kernel source tree, containing patches and drivers for Raspberry Pi hardware. It is the upstream source … | 92 | 5577 | active |
| binpash/try try is a command-line tool that lets you run a command and inspect its effects before committing changes to your live system. It uses Linux… | 84 | 5495 | active |
| Armbian The official build framework for the Armbian Linux distribution, a shell-based toolchain that compiles customizable Debian- or Ubuntu-based… | 95 | 5469 | active |
| Claude Desktop for Linux (unofficial repackaging) An unofficial repackaging project that distributes Anthropic's official Claude Desktop Linux .deb as .rpm, AppImage, Nix flake, and AUR pac… | 85 | 5468 | active |
| progrium/darwinkit DarwinKit (formerly MacDriver) provides Go bindings to native Apple frameworks like AppKit, Foundation, and WebKit via the Objective-C runt… | 24 | 5437 | active |
| google/tcmalloc TCMalloc is Google's fast, multi-threaded memory allocator implementing C's malloc() and C++'s operator new. It is a drop-in replacement al… | 77 | 5385 | stable |
| sindresorhus/create-dmg A Node.js CLI tool that automatically creates good-looking, code-signed DMG disk images for macOS app distribution. It is intentionally opi… | 65 | 5374 | active |
| microsoft/azurelinux Azure Linux is an open-source, general-purpose Linux distribution built and optimized for Microsoft Azure, with sources derived from Fedora… | 99 | 5355 | active |
| coreutils/coreutils GNU coreutils is the standard collection of GNU command-line utilities (ls, cp, mv, cat, sort, chmod, etc.) that form the basis of most Uni… | 94 | 5332 | stable |
| ChrisTitusTech/linutil Linutil is a distro-agnostic Linux toolbox built in Rust that provides an interactive terminal UI (TUI) for installing applications, config… | 82 | 5313 | active |
| Qtile Qtile is a full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written entirely in Python, configurable via Python scripts. It runs as an X11 win… | 94 | 5310 | active |
| u-boot/u-boot Das U-Boot is a widely used open-source bootloader for embedded boards based on PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and other processors. It is installed i… | 77 | 5286 | active |
| zq1997/deepin-wine A port of deepin's Wine environment and Windows application packages (QQ, WeChat, TIM, DingTalk, etc.) to Debian/Ubuntu, distributed as an … | 32 | 5282 | active |
| lxc/lxc LXC is a low-level Linux container runtime providing a userspace interface to kernel containment features like namespaces, cgroups, and man… | 81 | 5277 | stable |
| oshi/oshi OSHI is a free, cross-platform Java library for retrieving native operating system and hardware information using JNA or the JDK Foreign Fu… | 100 | 5271 | active |