DistroShop

A small desktop app for browsing distro images, testing them in a VM, and flashing them to a USB stick.

What it does

• Shows a list of Linux distros from a remote JSON catalog
• Displays each distro's image, summary, and full description
• Downloads the selected ISO
• Boots up a Virtual Machine running the ISO
• Flashes the ISO to a chosen block device

Current status

The app is being developed mainly for Linux, hence why only those binaries are built. Mileage with non-Linux builds may vary.

Requirements

• Rust and Dioxus-cli (if compiling from source)
• qemu-system (automatically included on flatpak)
• A target USB device
• A graphical desktop environment

Running the app

I recommend using the prebuilt binary or the flatpak, but you can also run it with dx:

dx run

Note: compiling and running with cargo will break some of the UI

Building the Flatpak

The Flatpak manifest is io.github.techcore3.distroshop.yml. Its Cargo dependencies are pinned in cargo-sources.json; regenerate that file whenever Cargo.lock changes using flatpak-cargo-generator.py Cargo.lock -o cargo-sources.json.

With Flatpak Builder and the GNOME 50 runtime and Rust extension installed, build with:

flatpak-builder --force-clean build-dir io.github.techcore3.distroshop.yml

Flashing safely

Before flashing, double-check the target device path.

The app writes directly to the selected block device. Make sure you are targeting the USB stick, not your system drive.

Project layout

src/
├── main.rs            # app entry point and launch logic
├── list_handler.rs    # distro catalog loading, caching, and UI
├── distro_testing/    # VM-based testing of distro images
│   ├── mod.rs
│   └── vm_handler.rs  # VM setup and test runs
└── flashing/          # download + flashing logic
    ├── mod.rs
    ├── flash_handler.rs
    ├── flasher_unix.rs
    ├── flasher_win.rs
    └── udisks2_wrapper.rs  # UDisks2 integration for Linux disk access
assets/
├── distros.json       # distro catalog used by the app
├── logo.png           # app favicon (works on everything except wayland)
├── screenshot*.png    # AppStream screenshots
└── main.css           # styling

License

GPL-3.0-only; see LICENSE.