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Hyperbola is a Free Software and Free Culture project aiming to provide a fully free as in freedom GNU/Linux operating system called Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre. It is a complete independent system based on the package-management from Arch GNU/Linux and using patchsets from Debian development for stability and security, with resulting packages optimized for i686 and x86_64 CPUs under Long Term Support (LTS). Hyperbola aims to keep its package and management tools simple, stable and secure. The primary goal is to give the user complete control over their system with 100% free software, free culture, security, privacy, stability and init freedom.

Development is focused on a balance of simplicity, elegance, code-correctness and bleeding edge Free Software.

Its lightweight and simple design makes it easy to extend and mold into whatever kind of system you're building.

You can find us on irc or forums.

Hyperbola has neither the intention to be just another system claiming something nor being the so-called ultimate answer. In a time with missing clear principles and values Hyperbola is nevertheless here for stating that free, libre software is for all beings to bring progress, privacy, security, freedom of democratic rights and up towards our essential point of technical emancipation, which is only possible with clear motivation for minimalism.

The idea of Hyperbola was born in FISL17 (Porto Alegre, Brazil) when people encouraged coadde and emulatorman to develop a fully free distribution based on Arch in combination with Debian level stability. Additional ideas such as building all packages from source instead of through a version control system, providing strong checksum (eg. SHA512) and signature verification, was inspired by Gaming4JC. In turn, this inspired emulatorman to develop the Hyperbola Packaging Guidelines and make an organized distribution.

Official development of Hyperbola began by our founders on April 15th of 2017. The project launched its official IRC channel in Freenode and webserver (located in Bissen, Luxembourg) on Gandi. The site went live May 20th of 2017 and our first stable version on was released July 13th of 2017.

The name of Hyperbola was Crazytoon's idea. He was one of Hyperbola founders who had plans to develop Hyper Bola, a new modification of his Bola character adapted as the official mascot of Hyperbola. In mathematics, a hyperbola is an open curve with two branches - the intersection of a plane with both halves of a double cone. Since both terms produces a word play, Hyperbola was the chosen name by our founders.

Crazytoon passed away prior to the Hyper Bola mascot being completed, but coadde has continued its development and will release it soon.

Yes, it is our main goal. Hyperbola is the first Brazilian distribution listed by the Free Software Foundation as a Free System Distribution, true to the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines. Hyperbola contains its own social contract and packaging guidelines which are the commitment that we make to follow the philosophy of the Free Software Movement.

Long Term Support (LTS) is a type of special versions or editions of software designed to be supported for a longer than normal period.

Unlike distributions such as Arch which are rolling release models, our goal is extend the period of software maintenance; it also alters the type and frequency of software updates (patches) to reduce the risk, expense, and disruption of software deployment, while promoting the dependability of the software.

See our releases page for further details.

The job of Hyperbola, independently of Freedom is, and always is, to develop a stable, minimalistic and privacy-oriented operating-system. Hyperbola releases several versions prior to releasing the stable branch. The other releases are means to that end. You may find these other releases perfectly usable for whatever use you have for them.

Understand, however, that Testing is testing; things are expected to break from time to time. Testing is just what it says it is; it is for testing whether it works reliably prior to its release as a future Stable. You may well find Testing reliable enough, and in fact others have remarked that Hyperbola Testing is more reliable than some other distributions' Stable releases.

Corollaries to this in the commercial world are Development, Testing, and Production. In theory, businesses do not let anyone anywhere near their Production servers until they have proven their latest release is not going to break anything which currently works, and whose new features or functionality have been documented to the business's satisfaction. This is what Hyperbola's Stable name means: that, once released, the operating system remains relatively unchanging over time.

YMMV. Caveat emptor. You get what you pay for. As the saying goes, “If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces”.

See our packaging guidelines for further details about our development.

Our objective is to support the privacy of our community, it means we strive distribute all software to be secure from global data surveillance revealed in the publication of Snowden's NSA documents. We offer additional hardened packages which remove lower level protocols that may cause privacy leaks, metadata/fingerprinting, and vulnerabilities.

The init freedom is about restoring a simplified and minimalistic approach to PID1, one that respects diversity and freedom of choice. We refuse init systems that break portability, ignore backwards compatibility, and replace existing services, forcing into adoption (eg. systemd).

No, Hyperbola is just using the package-management from Arch GNU/Linux and patchsets from Debian with special emphasis on stability, privacy, security and init freedom. We build all packages from scratch on our own, optimized for i686 and x86_64 CPUs.

We support the freedom to choose the essential packages like the system for init, however Hyperbola is not a system called as “based on” or “fork of”. The system is completely independent!

Hyperbola is also not following any other system-distribution alone, so it is neither to be recommended to use packages for example from Arch GNU/Linux nor it would be really possible in general. We are using pacman as our package-manager, but we do everything else on our own and so our packages are also not compatible with other systems.

The Installation Guide will walk you through the process of downloading an ISO from our repositories and installing Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre on your system.

Be sure to take a look at the Hyperbola Social Contract, it guides us in all we do.

Our frequently asked questions is to provide answers to questions often asked by users who moved to Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre from the Arch GNU/Linux and other GNU/Linux ones. It discusses issues caused by making the system completely free.

The official Hyperbola channel is #hyperbola, hosted on Libera Chat.

Some parts of this wiki article are based on the ParabolaWiki.