alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Bor – Open-source policy management for Linux desktops
Hi HN! I've been working on Bor, an open-source system for centralized Linux desktop management.
Bor consists of a lightweight Go agent and a central server. Policies are streamed to clients over mTLS/gRPC in real time—no polling—and currently support Firefox, Chrome, KDE, dconf, polkit and package management, with more coming.
Version 0.8 introduces several new policy types - Thunderbird, Microsoft Edge for Business and FirewallD zones, along with a number of improvements and fixes.
I'd love feedback on the architecture, policy model, and whether this is something you'd consider for managing Linux workstations.
Comments
Can this be used to enforce “screen time” for laptops given to children, hopefully in a more effective way than the equivalent systems on iOS and Android?
This is cool. I’m getting into this type of management for the first time after being in software development for a long time. What other open source or enterprise solutions is this potentially competing with? What made you write your own, as in, what you weren’t able to do or didn’t like about existing solutions?
How is configuration drift / policy enforcement handled if there's no polling interval? Like suppose a user changes a setting, does it revert back to the enforced setting, if so, when and how?
Love it!
Nice work on the mTLS/gRPC push design — the inotify drift-catch on parent dirs is a clean answer to the "revert happens before the user notices" problem, and I like that the audit trail is server-side. Question on the policy model: how do you handle conflicting policies across sources — say a package postinstall rewrites a managed file while a newer policy is mid-sync from the server, or two policy types touch the same file? Does the agent queue and reconcile revisions, or last-write-wins?
Also curious: with LDAP-only auth, how do non-domain single-user laptops fit in? I manage a few personal machines that I'd love to centralize but they aren't LDAP-joined — is there a lightweight path, or is the temp-token enrollment strictly for domain boxes?
This looks really close to what I need. I manage a few laptops for a non-profit. For now, it is all done by hand, since I haven't found a good solution for Linux and I will kill myself before using Windows and Intune again.
I would love to see configurations for Linux Mint's Cinnamon. Is there a way to execute custom scripts? How does the user mapping work exactly? Could I create a user in Authentik with a laptop-permission and this would map to a Linux user account?
Nonetheless, this is really great work so far, and if you keep it as nice and tidy as it currently looks, then you might make a nice niche for yourself. I can't wait to try it out.