OneFileLinux: A tiny recovery distro that fits snugly in your EFI system partition
Quoting: OneFileLinux: Not so much a distro as a pointer —
OneFileLinux is a very different sort of distro that runs entirely from your UEFI system partition, without a bootable USB key or any other partitions on the disk.
The OneFileLinux project has been inactive for a few years now, but it does work – and we feel that the concept is inspired. It points to the sort of thing that Linux distro vendors should be doing, rather than trying to work with proprietary vendors to further lock down the Linux boot process.
OneFileLinux squeezes a cut-down version of Alpine Linux into a single, 20 MB compressed file, which you copy into your EFI system partition (ESP). That's the relatively easy bit, although Windows goes out of its way to hide this partition from users so there are some extra steps needed to see it. Users of Intel Macs can just pick it from a list by holding down the Option key while turning their Mac on.