This website was made to share alternatives to the GNU ecosystem.
Busybox - BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox provides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system.
uutils coreutils - uutils coreutils is a cross-platform reimplementation of the GNU coreutils in Rust. While all programs have been implemented, some options might be missing or different behavior might be experienced.
Toybox - Toybox combines many common Linux command line utilities together into a single BSD-licensed executable. It’s simple, small, fast, and reasonably standards-compliant (POSIX-2008 and LSB 4.1).
BSD coreutils - The BSD coreutils are the utilities developed and used by various operating systems based on the Berkeley Software Distribution. These are included by default on BSD distributions and some Linux distributions like Chimera Linux.
Z shell (zsh) - Zsh is a shell designed for interactive use, although it is also a powerful scripting language.
Busybox shell (sh) - Included in Busybox.
Debian Almquist shell (dash) - Dash is a POSIX-compliant implementation of ´/bin/sh´ that aims to be as small as possible. It does this without sacrificing speed where possible.
Tiny C Compiler - Tiny C Compiler (TCC) is a minimal C compiler that can compile x86 and ARM code. This is my personal recommendation.
LLVM - The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. It is well-known as the backbone of Clang, a C compiler.
Some programs won’t compile well with TCC and/or Clang due to incompatible flags, different compiler interpretations of the code or in the case of Clang, produce wonky results. In practice, GCC and these compilers aren’t perfect and you can be flexible with this.
You can help by making more programs get along with TCC! It’s faster, portable, smaller and linking is quicker than GCC and Clang.
Here are free as in freedom non-GNU operating systems that respect your privacy.
Iglunix - Iglunix is a Linux distribution but, unlike almost all other Linux distributions, it has almost no GNU software.
Alpine Linux - Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. Out of all of the non-GNU distributions that exist so far, this one is probably the most popular.
Chimera Linux - Chimera is a general-purpose Linux-based OS born from unhappiness with the status quo. We aim to create a system that is simple, transparent, and easy to pick up, without having to give up practicality and a rich feature set.
BlissOS - BlissOS is an Android-based open source OS that incorporates many optimizations, features, and that supports many more devices.
Gentoo - Gentoo is a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution. The Gentoo project provides uutils in their repositories as a GNU drop-in replacement and LLVM stage-3 archives. This distribution is only for very advanced users.
Linux from Scratch - Feeling like binary distros are not enough for you? Linux from Scratch is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source code. You can build non-GNU installation for your purposes and needs.
FreeBSD - FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.
MidnightBSD - MidnightBSD is a BSD-derived operating system developed with desktop users in mind. It includes all the software you’d expect for your daily tasks — email, web browsing, word processing, gaming, and much more.
If you have the means and motivation, please help by making more distributions that don’t depend on the GNU ecosystem or by helping the distros above with more packages or other activities.
As far as I know, there isn’t a non-GNU implementation of Emacs.
This is a community project! I know I talked a lot about myself here, but I don’t want to be the only one yapping here. It would be very much appreciated if you help expand this site. You can suggest more alternatives, and other stuff. Just open an issue or pull request!