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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| xmonad XMonad is a dynamically tiling window manager for X11, written and configured in Haskell, that automatically arranges windows without gaps … | 76 | 3603 | stable |
| sbarex/QLMarkdown QLMarkdown is a macOS application providing a Quick Look extension for previewing Markdown files, plus a CLI and Shortcut extension for con… | 93 | 3600 | active |
| casualsnek/cassowary Cassowary is a Python application that lets Linux users run Windows applications from a Windows VM as if they were native, built on FreeRDP… | 23 | 3587 | active |
| LGFae/swww swww (now renamed awww) is an efficient animated wallpaper daemon for Wayland, controlled at runtime via a CLI client. It supports animated… | 10 | 3584 | active |
| acidanthera/AppleALC AppleALC is an open-source macOS kernel extension (kext) that enables native HD audio for codecs not officially supported by Apple, without… | 89 | 3579 | active |
| microsoft/ebpf-for-windows eBPF for Windows is an MIT-licensed implementation of the eBPF runtime that runs on top of the Windows kernel, letting developers reuse fam… | 86 | 3573 | active |
| termux/proot-distro A Python CLI utility for managing rootless Linux containers using proot, in Termux on Android or on regular Linux hosts. It can pull Docker… | 100 | 3566 | active |
| jessfraz/dotfiles A collection of shell dotfiles for configuring a Linux/macOS development environment, installed via symlinks with a simple make command. It… | 77 | 3565 | stable |
| ivoronin/TomatoBar TomatoBar is a Pomodoro timer that lives in the macOS menu bar, offering configurable work/rest intervals, sounds, notifications, and a glo… | 77 | 3565 | stable |
| etchdroid/etchdroid EtchDroid is an open-source Android application that writes OS disk images to USB flash drives and USB SD card adapters without requiring r… | 82 | 3543 | active |
| Winetricks/winetricks Winetricks is a shell script that provides an easy way to work around problems in Wine, the Windows compatibility layer. It offers a menu o… | 71 | 3543 | active |
| Eclipse ThreadX Eclipse ThreadX is an advanced real-time operating system (RTOS) for deeply embedded applications, featuring a picokernel architecture, pre… | 90 | 3538 | active |
| X1a0He/Adobe-Downloader A native macOS application for downloading and installing Adobe apps directly from official Adobe channels, without needing Creative Cloud.… | 75 | 3535 | active |
| mayukh4/linux-android A set of Bash scripts that turn an old Android phone into a GPU-accelerated Linux desktop (XFCE4, KDE Plasma, LXQt, or MATE) or a Home Assi… | 56 | 3535 | active |
| Arc Loader Arc is a customized Redpill boot loader that lets Synology DSM 7.x (Xpenology) run on arbitrary consumer hardware. It detects CPU, network,… | 93 | 3527 | active |
| containers/toolbox Toolbx is a Linux command-line tool for creating interactive containerized command line environments on top of Podman and OCI technologies.… | 82 | 3525 | active |
| BlackArch Linux BlackArch Linux is an Arch Linux-based penetration testing distribution bundling over 2,800 security tools for penetration testers and secu… | 76 | 3524 | active |
| SeaDve/Kooha Kooha is a simple, minimal screen recorder for Linux built with GTK4 and GStreamer in Rust. It records the screen with optional microphone … | 80 | 3520 | active |
| nana-4/materia-theme Materia is a Material Design theme for GNOME/GTK-based desktop environments, supporting GTK 2/3/4, GNOME Shell, and other desktops like Xfc… | 53 | 3511 | active |
| dragoonDorise/EmuDeck EmuDeck is a collection of shell scripts that autoconfigure emulators on the Steam Deck or other Linux distributions, setting up rom direct… | 87 | 3509 | active |
| alienator88/Pearcleaner Pearcleaner is a free, source-available, fair-code licensed macOS application cleaner for fully uninstalling apps and finding orphaned file… | 69 | 14799 | maintenance |
| benbaker76/Hackintool Hackintool is a macOS GUI utility for vanilla Hackintosh hardware patching, best known for Intel framebuffer patching from Sandy Bridge thr… | 69 | 3504 | active |
| Munki Munki is an open-source set of tools for managed software installation on macOS, pairing a webserver-based package repository with client-s… | 95 | 3473 | stable |
| johnfanv2/LenovoLegionLinux A Linux kernel driver and Python GUI/CLI tools for controlling Lenovo Legion laptop hardware features such as fan curves, power modes, powe… | 99 | 3472 | active |
| TextMate TextMate is an open-source graphical text editor for macOS 10.12+, written in Objective-C++ with a C++ core. It supports many programming l… | 23 | 14578 | maintenance |
| sveinbjornt/Platypus Platypus is a macOS developer tool that wraps command line scripts (shell, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, etc.) into native Mac application bundl… | 60 | 3451 | stable |
| mczachurski/wallpapper A Swift console application for macOS that creates dynamic wallpapers (.heic) introduced in macOS Mojave, from a JSON description and image… | 65 | 3437 | stable |
| winevdm winevdm (otvdm) is a 16-bit Windows application emulator that lets Win16 executables (Windows 1.x through 3.1) run on 64-bit Windows. It co… | 66 | 3424 | active |
| Archcraft Archcraft is a minimal Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, featuring preconfigured lightweight window managers and themes. This reposit… | 71 | 3409 | active |
| WeChatPlugin-MacOS A macOS WeChat (微信) tweak/plugin written in Objective-C that injects extra features into the official WeChat client, such as message anti-r… | 23 | 14281 | maintenance |
| acidanthera/WhateverGreen WhateverGreen is a Lilu kernel extension (kext) plugin that applies various patches to ATI/AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs on macOS, primarily … | 86 | 3388 | active |
| b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja A shell script that scans your $HOME directory for files and directories that should be relocated according to the XDG Base Directory speci… | 67 | 3388 | active |
| ophub/fnnas A project that builds and adapts the FnNAS operating system (a Debian-based NAS OS) for Arm64 devices powered by Amlogic, Rockchip, and All… | 78 | 3373 | active |
| BarutSRB/OmniWM OmniWM is a tiling window manager for macOS inspired by Niri and Hyprland, offering scrolling columns, BSP/dwindle layouts, a Ghostty-power… | 80 | 3361 | active |
| pctrade/end4-pC A personal fork of end-4's illogical-impulse (dots-hyprland) desktop shell, written in QML for Quickshell on Hyprland. It provides a Materi… | 60 | 3344 | active |
| linrunner/TLP TLP is a feature-rich Linux command-line utility that optimizes laptop battery life by applying tuned kernel settings automatically. It off… | 90 | 3342 | active |
| Keyitdev/sddm-astronaut-theme A collection of modern, customizable themes for the SDDM display manager on Linux, written in QML with Qt6. It includes ten pre-made themes… | 75 | 3336 | active |
| disko disko is a declarative disk partitioning and formatting tool for NixOS that lets you define disks, partitions, filesystems, and mount point… | 80 | 3332 | active |
| macOS-Simple-KVM A collection of shell scripts and documentation for setting up a macOS virtual machine in QEMU, accelerated by KVM, on Linux hosts without … | 32 | 13941 | maintenance |
| jaredks/rumps rumps is a Python library for creating macOS status bar (menu bar) apps with minimal boilerplate, wrapping PyObjC behind a simple decorator… | 60 | 3323 | stable |
| netwide-assembler/nasm NASM (the Netwide Assembler) is a portable, cross-platform assembler for the x86 and x86-64 CPU architectures using Intel-like syntax. It s… | 73 | 3314 | stable |
| vishvananda/netlink A Go library providing a simple, high-level API for Linux netlink socket communication, modeled loosely on the iproute2 CLI. It lets user-s… | 64 | 3312 | stable |
| NixOS/nixos-hardware A collection of NixOS modules providing hardware-specific configuration profiles for laptops, desktops, and other devices. It lets users im… | 66 | 3307 | active |
| Figma-Linux/figma-linux An unofficial Electron-based desktop client for the Figma interface design tool, packaged for Linux. It wraps the browser-based Figma app i… | 48 | 3287 | active |
| emersion/mako mako is a lightweight notification daemon for Wayland that implements the FreeDesktop Notifications Specification. It renders desktop notif… | 70 | 3279 | active |
| Batocera Linux Batocera Linux is an open-source retro-gaming Linux distribution that turns any computer or single-board computer into a dedicated game con… | 68 | 3265 | active |
| RPi-Distro/pi-gen pi-gen is the official tool used to build Raspberry Pi OS disk images and custom images based on it. It orchestrates staged builds using de… | 75 | 3262 | active |
| myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox A Bash script that automates installing macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra as VirtualBox guests on x86 CPUs, using unmodified macOS in… | 10 | 13512 | maintenance |
| riscv-software-src/riscv-isa-sim Spike is the official RISC-V ISA simulator, providing a functional model of one or more RISC-V harts. It implements a broad range of RISC-V… | 66 | 3238 | active |
| util-linux/util-linux util-linux is a collection of essential Linux system utilities distributed by the Linux Kernel Organization, including tools like mount, fd… | 76 | 3235 | stable |
| nix-community/nh nh is a Rust-based CLI helper that wraps and improves common Nix and NixOS commands, including flake-based rebuilds, home-manager, and nix-… | 94 | 3219 | active |
| CosmosOS/Cosmos Cosmos is an operating system construction kit that lets developers build bare-metal OS kernels using .NET languages like C#, VB.NET, and F… | 99 | 3217 | active |
| open-telemetry/opentelemetry-ebpf-profiler A whole-system, cross-language continuous profiler for Linux built on eBPF, part of the OpenTelemetry project. It profiles all processes on… | 68 | 3193 | active |
| Photon OS Photon OS is an open-source, security-hardened minimal Linux distribution purpose-built as a container host for cloud-native applications, … | 66 | 3178 | active |
| Toybox Toybox combines many common Linux command line utilities (cp, mv, cat, etc.) into a single small, fast, BSD-licensed multicall binary that … | 76 | 3162 | active |
| greshake/i3status-rust i3status-rust is a resource-friendly, feature-rich replacement for i3status written in pure Rust. It renders configurable 'blocks' of syste… | 80 | 3154 | active |
| Quickshell Quickshell is a toolkit for building desktop shell components such as status bars, widgets, lockscreens, and display managers using QtQuick… | 89 | 3151 | active |
| Systeminformation Suite A dependency-free Node.js library for retrieving detailed system and OS information such as CPU, memory, disk, network, and battery stats. … | 97 | 3137 | active |
| Tilck Tilck is a tiny educational Linux-compatible kernel written in C and assembly, targeting i386 and riscv64 with UEFI boot support. It implem… | 75 | 3132 | active |
| openhwgroup/cva6 CVA6 is an open-source, 6-stage, single-issue, in-order RISC-V CPU core written in SystemVerilog, supporting the 64-bit RV64GC ISA with thr… | 73 | 3128 | active |
| azlux/log2ram A shell script that mounts /var/log in RAM to avoid constant writes to disk, extending SD card life on devices like the Raspberry Pi. It pe… | 55 | 3126 | active |
| oasislinux/oasis Oasis is a small, fully statically-linked Linux system built around musl, with reproducible builds driven by Lua-generated samurai manifest… | 58 | 3114 | active |
| Astal AGS is a scaffolding CLI for building Wayland desktop shells with the Astal and Gnim libraries, using JavaScript/TypeScript with JSX on the… | 68 | 3107 | active |
| AMD-OSX/AMD_Vanilla A collection of binary kernel patches that enable near-native AMD CPU support on macOS via the OpenCore bootloader. It supports AMD 15h, 16… | 53 | 3097 | active |
| nix-community/NixOS-WSL NixOS-WSL provides modules and a distributable NixOS image for running NixOS inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux. It lets Windows users … | 83 | 3096 | active |
| nix-rust/nix A Rust crate providing safe, friendly bindings to Unix-like platform APIs (Linux, macOS, BSD, etc.), wrapping unsafe libc calls in typed, R… | 77 | 3081 | active |
| u-root/u-root u-root is a Go-based userland that provides nearly 200 Unix commands rewritten in Go, compilable into a single busybox-style binary, plus t… | 75 | 3077 | active |
| p8952/bocker Bocker is a minimal reimplementation of Docker in roughly 100 lines of bash, using Linux namespaces, cgroups, btrfs, and iptables to pull i… | 32 | 12679 | maintenance |
| macmade/Hot Hot is a macOS menu bar application that displays the CPU speed limit caused by thermal throttling, along with CPU temperature and thermal … | 23 | 3059 | active |
| Wayfire Wayfire is a modular and extensible 3D Wayland compositor built on wlroots, inspired by Compiz. It provides a customizable, lightweight des… | 85 | 3055 | active |
| ophub/amlogic-s9xxx-openwrt A build and firmware distribution project that runs OpenWrt on Amlogic, Rockchip, and Allwinner TV boxes and single-board computers. It pro… | 99 | 3049 | active |
| LeftWM LeftWM is a tiling window manager for X11 written in Rust, focused on stability and performance while doing one thing well: managing window… | 85 | 3048 | active |
| IceWhaleTech/ZimaOS ZimaOS is an open-source, simplified NAS operating system evolved from CasaOS, built with Buildroot for x86-64 UEFI hardware and Zima devic… | 96 | 3031 | active |
| siduck/chadwm Chadwm is a pre-configured, aesthetically enhanced build of the dwm tiling window manager for X11 Linux systems, with themes like Nord, Cat… | 55 | 3026 | active |
| pythops/bluetui Bluetui is a terminal user interface (TUI) application for managing Bluetooth on Linux via BlueZ. It lets users scan, pair, connect, trust,… | 76 | 3019 | active |
| mirage/mirage MirageOS is a library operating system written in OCaml that compiles application code into fully standalone, specialized unikernels for se… | 89 | 2993 | active |
| SadServers/sadservers SadServers is a SaaS platform for practicing Linux and DevOps troubleshooting skills on real ephemeral Linux servers in a Capture-the-Flag … | 75 | 2993 | active |
| erpalma/throttled A Linux daemon that prevents firmware-induced CPU throttling on Intel systems by periodically restoring package power limits (PL1/PL2) and … | 94 | 2989 | active |
| microsoft/wil A header-only C++ library from Microsoft providing readable, type-safe C++ interfaces for common Windows coding patterns. It includes RAII … | 73 | 2979 | stable |
| microsoft/AttackSurfaceAnalyzer Attack Surface Analyzer is a Microsoft open-source security tool that scans an operating system's security configuration before and after s… | 76 | 2960 | active |
| orhun/kmon kmon is a terminal-based Linux kernel manager and activity monitor written in Rust. It lets users view kernel information, manage kernel mo… | 77 | 2951 | active |
| EVV1E/waylandcraft A Fabric mod for Minecraft that implements a Wayland compositor, letting users run real Linux desktop applications inside the Minecraft gam… | 84 | 2946 | active |
| adi1090x/plymouth-themes A collection of 80+ Plymouth boot splash themes ported from Android boot animations. It provides eye-candy graphical boot screens for Linux… | 23 | 2946 | active |
| Andronix Andronix is an open-source backend of shell scripts that lets users install Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro, Kali, etc.) on un… | 66 | 2940 | active |
| Metabolix/HackBGRT HackBGRT is a UEFI application that changes the Windows boot logo by overwriting the Boot Graphics Resource Table (BGRT) during boot. It sh… | 63 | 2940 | active |
| linux-can/can-utils A collection of Linux user-space utilities for the SocketCAN subsystem, written in C. It includes tools to display, send, generate, record,… | 67 | 2939 | active |
| Darkkal44/qylock A collection of themed lockscreen and login-screen setups for SDDM and Quickshell on Linux, styled after games like NieR: Automata, Terrari… | 58 | 2888 | active |
| gem5 gem5 is the official open-source computer-system architecture simulator for research and teaching, modeling processor microarchitecture and… | 86 | 2871 | active |
| pop-os/pop Pop!_OS is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu by System76, designed for creators, developers, and makers with features like auto-tiling w… | 75 | 2871 | active |
| Canop/dysk dysk is a Rust command-line utility that lists mounted filesystems with a readable table, like df but better. It supports customizable colu… | 98 | 2866 | active |
| labwc Labwc is a lightweight, wlroots-based window-stacking compositor for Wayland, inspired by Openbox. It focuses on stacking windows well and … | 93 | 2858 | active |
| wickenico/WailBrew WailBrew is a modern, native graphical interface for the Homebrew package manager on macOS, built with Go, Wails, and React. It lets users … | 82 | 2843 | active |
| tkashkin/GameHub GameHub is a unified game library application for Linux that aggregates games from Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and itch.io into a single GTK… | 10 | 2843 | active |
| sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch SteamTinkerLaunch is a versatile Linux wrapper tool for the Steam client that provides graphical menus for configuring game launch options … | 46 | 2839 | active |
| Botspot/pi-apps Pi-Apps is a free, open-source graphical app store for Raspberry Pi computers, written in shell scripts. It simplifies installing and unins… | 77 | 2832 | active |
| LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv LibreELEC is a lightweight 'Just enough OS' Linux distribution purpose-built for running Kodi on popular mediacentre hardware. This reposit… | 73 | 2831 | active |
| coreboot/coreboot coreboot is an open-source firmware project that replaces proprietary BIOS/UEFI on computers, performing hardware initialization and then h… | 67 | 2807 | active |
| ColinIanKing/stress-ng stress-ng is a command-line stress testing tool with 380+ stressors that exercise CPU, memory, filesystem, and OS kernel interfaces. It is … | 94 | 2793 | active |
| billw2/rpi-clone rpi-clone is a standalone shell script for cloning a running Raspberry Pi's booted disk (SD card or USB) to a bootable destination disk. It… | 32 | 2793 | active |
| atar-axis/xpadneo An advanced Linux kernel driver for the Xbox One wireless controller (Bluetooth), built as a DKMS module in C. It fixes quirks of the stock… | 88 | 2785 | active |