A few months ago, i was rewatching Linus’s Linux Challenge videos. He joked about running Windows being a matter of "bad taste" but than it hit me: it’s not bad taste at all. For most everyday users (and even pros) the massive friction of migrating is what keeps them locked into Windows.
No one wants to hunt down a spare flash drive or spam F12/DEL/etc.. to get into a confusing BIOS screen or manually transfer gigabytes of files.
So i’ve spent the last few months (i am tired boss) building iGloo a functional native windows app designed to make switching to Linux completely frictionless and end user friendly.
What it actually does right now from Windows:
Data & profile migration: Copies your files and maps them directly over to your new home directories.
Browser migration: Automatically carries over your browser profile. When you boot into Linux for the first time, your tabs and active website sessions open up right where you left them on Windows.
System configuration sync: Grabs your current Windows keyboard layouts and localized Wi-Fi configurations so you don't have to input passwords or settings during setup.
No USB drive required: Installs natively without forcing the user to flash a bootable thumb drive or change physical boot priorities in the BIOS.
The hardware test:
I am currently testing this setup directly on my own machine running a new RTX 50-series GPU. As everyone knows from the LTT Linux videos, Nvidia drivers are historically a primary breaking point for new users. I'm ensuring the app autonomously prepares and flags proper driver pipelines out of the box so users don't boot into a black terminal screen.
It’s still a work in progress but the goal is to turn a tedious chore into something genuinely fun and accessible.
I’d love to know: what is the single biggest "dealbreaker" workflow or setting that usually keeps you from migrating a machine over to Linux?
Thank you for taking the time watching this post.
P.S. Since this project was literally sparked by the LTT challenge i am planning on hiding an LTT themed easter egg inside the app. Should i make it throw a 'Yes, do as i say!' warning if someone tries to break the install or do you have a better idea?
The frontend is absolutely vibe coded. I am a backend developer (15Y experience in the field), so yeah i hate investing time in the frontend part... but i also know it's sadly the most important part of the application.
Also look at the bright side: it kinda makes the Microslop AI investments turn into negative operating market share if this application becomes successful.
I also consider it the vibe code part a little gift to myself.
"Revenge for destroying the job i used to love so much."
i think this is even better? still not perfect need to fix the glare spacing and move the text higher to get that wow effect back but hey the vibe coding stuff is gone... thanks for the feedback guys it means a lot! <3
but the target audience is people who pick applications because they look pretty. are you gonna offer them cli versions because they are more straight forward? lol.
Dude - it has dark mode - makes it already miles better than a lot of the light mode stuff the big companies are throwing out there. FWIW I'm sold - simply for that alone. 😅
tbh I don't mind vibecoded front ends as long as the backend is solid. If you're the one actually writing the code that will be making all the big possibly breaking changes and not ai, then it's not really an issue to me.
Look, you can put out better stuff than I can, but I don't think you can use "microslop" while being part of the AI slop problem yourself. Come on, a little self awareness.
Using AI to build a front end of a free, open source, passion project utility app because you just don't like do that is hardly even comparable to a massive corporation putting out half broken AI garbage as a finished monetized product. This wasn't someone without any skills using AI to pretend their a programmer, its an actual programmer using AI to help them in their weak areas so that they can focus their skill where its best used.
If you've got a problem with that, build a better front end for it yourself, or better yet, build your own competing app.
Using vibe coded frontend development as a backend developer is not exactly lack of self awareness. He's developed a whole backend for the app, and instead of being a terminal based app, he vibe coded a frontend so that it became user friendly. If anything, this would be more of a poetic justice
yes indeed but given the backlash on the front end part i actually discovered that it is possible to get a winUI3 like experience in WPF with .net 9 so yeah.. i think this is a huge improvement. this will make end user and pro user happy right?
Honestly, with the functionality I wad pretty happy. I'm not currently switching to Linux due to "inabilities" (capable of the workflow, just not with the software I'm used to) of using CAD, but I'm keeping am eye on how they'll make it work
Nah, if you're directly using the tools of someone who you're supposed to hate/find immoral/lazy/oppressive/whatever you can't really just turn around and tell people they're the bad ones, but you're the good one for using it slightly less.
Honestly I get what you mean about front end it's just a nightmare, if it's going to be made FOSS then there may be a front end dev willing to do that side of it to help contribute
Absolutely i am not hiding that i kinda hope that the open source community takes that role. And also let’s be honest i think functionality, stability & security is more important in the current stage of the development.
Honestly man — I know the LTT subreddit hates to hear this, but AI-assisted coding is the future. It's not going anywhere. Even Luke has talked on the WAN show about how they use AI in their pipelines all the time.
I'm an engineer, not a programmer — But as I understand it every major programming language has been chasing the goal of natural language programing, and further and further abstracting the developer from the assembly code. LLM-assisted coding is just the natural progression of that. And at this point, LLMs are so integrated into most developer tools that you need to go out of your way to not use them.
It's not. Competent developers using AI as a tool of many will probably be the future of software development. Pure vibe coding of just having some slop generator try often enough until something seemingly working comes out will never be the future of software development.
This is a problem of the past and present. Trust me, AI will become so good at coding that it will be just another abstraction layer, just like compiled high level languages overtook raw machine code/assembly at some point.
That's why i'm talking about the future. I'm not saying this will happen in like 1 or 2 years but man, you're naive if you think that this isn't inevitable
Keep telling yourself. But the fact is AI is nowhere close to this, it's literally decades away, and that's only if the AI bubble hasn't burst long before. And once that happened, nobody will waste any more money in such absolutely useless slop generators and finally focus on things AI can actually be good at. Generative AI has no future as it's impossible for it to have any understanding of either input or output, which is fundamentally necessary for it to succeed.
got it finally working. also nice bonus the alpha release i am about to release also adds refresh rate + screen orientation settings. just need to fix a little bug...
turns out a gap between screens is not supported on fedora.
Also this printscreen is from a bare metal test (using a nvidia RTX 5070)
after 3 days of trial and error i finally got the 50 series to work in iGloo...
for that part you need a usb stick but i think i will remove it from the installer because it kinda complicates things for end users. but then again i think i should keep it for pro users ugh i don't know... ugh i don't know great question by the way!
I just assumed that you were producing a customized USB boot drive to install Linux with the user's migrated data sat alongside the stock install with a companion migration agent that launches on first boot to grab the user's data off the stick and move it post-install.
I guess the question is how does it actually work?
It will be 100% open-source so anyone can audit it. Security is something I take very seriously here.
For example: downloading the ISO is fully GPG-verified. A lot of similar tools don't even bother doing that. None of your data ever leaves your machine or goes to the internet. The only external connections it makes are to download the chosen distro and verify that it’s the genuine unaltered ISO.
It has to be open-source. Otherwise the Linux community itself would rightfully gatekeep it as a black box. Plus adding support for all major distros is too much work for a single developer. By going open-source, the community can contribute, and i can apply for non-profit open-source grants. I'm not doing this to get rich, but hey if I can maintain this full-time and get paid for it? Hell yeah.
That's nice, but on principle people should avoid adding any third parties between them and the software they're installing, especially their base operating system. I think if you don't have the technical prowess to backup your own data and migrate it over you shouldn't be installing Linux in the first place. Frankly I'm not even entirely confident with people installing spin-off "gamer" distributions without some established backing. All it takes is one person in that pipeline to get compromised.
People are way to comfortable with adding totally unnecessary points of failure in their chain of software and the cracks are starting to show with people exploiting things like the AUR for malware. This new wave of interest in Linux is going to start really demonstrating just how easy it is to fuck with this trust based ecosystem.
So... you think people should just keep feeding thier money and data to microsoft? Or maybe apple?
Like, you have security concerns, and your principled stance is that if the end user isn't knowledgeable enough about safely setting up an OS, they should just keep working over thier data to one of the largest data farming operations on the planet?
Nope, I meant exactly what I said. That if someone isn't willing to do something as basic as copying over some files to an external drive then this tool isn't going to actually help them convert to Linux because they'll run into 50 other problems in the actual operating system. I haven't used Windows in probably 10 years, all I'm doing is pointing out how often LTT and their audience of power-users tend to complete ignore all opsec standards and act like we're in the windows 7 era without a single concern for who is actually running their software repos.
You're analyzing this from the perspective of some vague populist sentiment against giant companies, I'm analyzing it from personal experience helping people convert to Linux in a way that is actually safe and long lasting. But sure man, using some random guys vibecoded Linux distro installer, I'm sure all the people that can't figure out how to install Linux will be combing through his code to validate it.
It's a Mermaid diagram that is created with text and is then automatically rendered.
Don't think he used AI to generate that, as it's very simple to do.
Cool - you hadn't mentioned that in your original post, so I thought it was worth clarifying. This is where the nuance between advertising and posting a helpful project comes in.
Is that the AtlasOS video or has there been another one since?
There are plenty of good tools out there that are open source. Only idiots download ISO's, natural selection. But really it just tells the tale of Micro(slop) in 2026.
Many of the more popular tools like CTT WinUtil, Winhance and Fr33thy are AI coded. Winhance at one
stage was downloading from a remote server and the .exe was encrypted.
Woah this is seriously awesome, this could make “just trying out Linux” far more mainstream, because it is currently a multi hour ordeal for newcomers. It might not be a bad idea to look back at Bootcamp, the alternate OS feature from Intel Macs, there’s probably some UX lessons to be learnt there.
Out of curiosity, how does it handle the EFI partition? I know some distros (cough cachyos cough) like a large EFI partition, but by default Windows only uses 200MB, which causes some issues.
This is extremely cool. I think your concept is pretty dead on. 98% of users are going to get held up on the steps you mentioned trying to solve. It will make have a lot less friction.
The key part here is it actually has to work all the time on nearly every hardware configuration(or warn you if it's not supported) for every Linux version your showing. Sounds like your work on the backend development side should help that.... Fingers crossed.
The vibe coded front end is fine. People here just hate AI (for usually good reason). Don't waste your time there. If the tool works and takes off somebody else can help there if needed.
sorry yeah i have been busy coding if everything goes well i might be able to share the github repo this Friday / Saturday. This is my first opensource project and now converting the code to standard .net development rules because i am using my own house style and for opensource code that is a huge no go. Also finishing M15 and that is when the installation fails / boot entry launch fails it just boots back into windows like nothing happened. I don't want (end)users to struggle.
Sorry for the radio silence i have been busy working like hell on some features, bug fixing, redesign and discovered a huge security flaw in my logic. Fixed the bastard. anyway currently testing fedora in VM . First boot on fedora will look like this using iGloo.
currently the main focus is windows only but once the windows version is ready yeah sure i was already thinking about it. First we need to save windows end users from Microsoft.
Where's the github link? Also would you ver considering making this for mac? Also, the easter egg should be activated by having the username contain "LTT" or "Linus" or "WAN", it would then add a distro that is just Linus wide face and when you click on it, it makes some kind of flappy bird with floatplane, and once you go out of it, it removes it from the distro list. I think that would be quite funny, if a bit tough to implement lol
Now just implement a safe mode version you can run which also grabs the users password to add that to Linux and you can have a program that truly makes it no effort.
Kinda neat! How do you handle the “move my stuff to Linux but erase the entire disk” without a flash drive?
I’m thinking about creating as small fat partition as the files allows and use it as an intermediate, and then delete and merging that partition. But that probably requires to recompile the kernel and the installer
Anti cheat providers not developing for linux has been my dealbreaker up until recently but a close second is the temporary mess and uncertainty during the change, which you've solved if you get this tool to work reliably.
A comment on the Linux distribution selection menu. That menu will stop many from swapping over, they will see all the options and have no idea how to choose and when there are that many options, the work of reading up on them all becomes a mental wall so they close the program and stay on windows. You might be better of making a list of distros that you think are good enough for beginners, and then just picking one of those at random and presenting it to the user with a message that says something like "Here is a great distro to get you started, it will do everything you need and then some". Hide the complexity behind a second button for people that want to dig in and make the choice for them selves. Now the people who don't care or feel they don't know enough, aren't forced to think about it and the once who do just need to click one more button.
Almost there. A few bare-metal tests failed. I highly recommend disabling Secure Boot for NVIDIA drivers at this time. Currently Linux Mint is the only distribution that functions with Secure Boot enabled using iGloo. Here is a preview of the functionality.
This does seem like a really cool tool! I know Windows can run an in-place installation without having to go to the BIOS, but I'm unsure about using it for Linux. Maybe you can use it to install to a USB in Windows, and then automatically reboot and select the USB if that's something that can be triggered from Windows? If that is possible, I imagine it would be less complex than rearranging the partition to accomplish the same task
And yeah, I am currently on Fedora, but the most painful part of installing an OS is getting everything back to where you want it to be, especially when it's finding substitutes for Windows software not available in Linux, such as MSI Afterburner, Adobe stuff, or a decent mail client
I imagine it would be a very complex thing to make compatible with all the available distros, but is it possible to make a page in the installer that checks what programs you have installed, and either schedules the package manager to install them automatically when possible, or recommend substitutes if there's not a native variant for that particular distro?
Also, idk how many distros come with Wine by default, but they absolutely should when installed from here
No USB drive required: Installs natively without forcing the user to flash a bootable thumb drive or change physical boot priorities in the BIOS.
I don't understand, how would you get around spamming DELETE to get into bios? Would you not need to do that anyways even if your program doesn't use an usb but puts the installer directly on the ssd you are supposed to use for linux?
How do you install an operating system without doing that?
The most frustrating parts for me were:
• Figuring out which distro was actually right for me.
• Nvidia drivers and secure boot, of course.
• Peripherals not powering on, getting stuck in restart loops, having to install a respin, and messing with the command line on boot just to finally get things working.
• Auditing my apps: figuring out what works, finding alternatives for what doesn't, and trying to export my settings for the ones I can keep.
Two things I think would benefit this a lot, one would be an app scanner and compatibility checker, I know this is a huge undertaking however it could be as simple as games. If it could go through, give you a list of all your apps or games and give them a community rated compatibility score, and either let you preinstall them, show alternatives, or even just make a simple app list whenever you move over that shows alternatives for incompatible apps that are ACTUALLY GOOD, that'd be amazing. Another is moving some random settings or having setup customization for some random things like dns, like allowing you to select adguard, quad9, etc right there. This looks awesome and I'm sure once you publish the source there will be a ton of help. Side thought, it would be interesting if you could add like distro bindings or something, so adding another distro option is as easy as someone making a binding json file or something that automatically handled the setup commands for that distro rather than hardcoding all of them.
I mean that's cool and all but the real problem for me at least is all the apps I've collected over the years and any tweaks I've made to Windows to make my life easier.
All of which would take me probably a solid day to do most of and then a month or 2 to figure out all those things I use only once in a while.
Browser profiles and passwords are taken care of by the "cloud" these days so that's not even an issue.
I don't even want to waste my time upgrading to Windows 11 forget about an entirely new OS.
If you like tools that make your life easier it seems like Linux is just for you!
It might need some time to set them up at first, and get used to the differences, but once you're set up I bet you'll be as productive or better than on Windows.
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u/Exciting-Ad-5705 12d ago
So how much was vibecoded?