A free Windows app, hop, installs dual-boot Linux from your hard drive with no USB stick
hop downloads an official Linux ISO, checks it, makes room on your disk and puts the installer on a small partition of its own, so a Windows PC can start Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora or a dozen others without a flash drive. Undo hands the space back.
The trick is in one sentence of the README: “A USB installer is just a FAT32 drive with the ISO’s files on it. hop makes the same thing on your internal disk.” It finds room after the drive you chose, using free space first and shrinking the drive only if it has to. It copies the ISO’s files onto a small FAT32 partition and checks each one. Then it adds a startup entry with the ISO’s own signed boot loader, “for the next restart only,” and the Linux installer opens into the space hop set aside.
The list of systems is long. It covers elementary OS, Ubuntu and seven of its flavors, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin OS, Debian, Fedora Workstation, Ultramarine, CachyOS, Arch Linux and Omarchy. hop downloads each one “from the project’s own server and verifies its checksum where the project publishes one,” or uses an ISO you already have.
The developer, who goes by Arjun on GitHub and dunkedtoast on X, shipped three releases in its first day. Version 0.1.0 went up at 12 a.m. Pacific on October 31, and version 0.2.0 followed that morning. Between them, the three builds of hop.exe had been downloaded 319 times by Saturday evening, while the repo itself passed 740 stars.
There’s also a way to replace Windows entirely, for Ubuntu, Zorin OS, Debian and Arch only. It’s a separate choice with its own warning, and you have to type ERASE. hop only offers it “for systems where hop has seen it erase a disk and start again afterwards.”
The README’s own fine print says one choice is still unproven. Other Ubuntu-based ISOs “should work too, if you choose the file yourself,” which leaves every distro outside the list to whoever tries it first.
