A project that allows a full installed-in-place Linux installation with grub and all, no USB drive required.
This could be possible today. A combination of PXE booting and FAI would be enough. I think you’d just need to work out a way for PXE to work over the public Internet. Otherwise you’d need to have the image downloaded already and have it available via web server to be accessible from the booting machine. Years ago I used iPXE and it was really nice. Haven’t used it in a loooong time.
Also, Talos is doing some really interesting install processes as well. Basically you boot a small (~80mb) image, it exposes a network port, and you send it a machine configuration manifest. It all runs in memory until the configuration instructions are sent, then it installs. There isn’t even an option to install it locally because local auth is not allowed and ssh is not included. You must do it over the network. Talos is all kubernetes so might not be what you’re looking for but it’s an interesting approach.