About Hyperbola
Hyperbola is a Free Software and Free Culture project aiming to provide a fully free as in freedom operating system called Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre and finally a full new BSD descendant named HyperbolaBSD. It is a fully free, libre and independent long-term support system using the package-management from Arch GNU/Linux and patchsets from Debian development. Packages are optimized for i686 and x86_64 CPUs. The primary goal is to give the user complete control over their system with 100% free and libre software, culture, and security plus privacy. We call this technical emancipation as the users are always in charge and command!
Development is focused on a balance of simplicity, elegance, code-correctness and bleeding edge Free Software.
Beginning
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 system.
Official development of Hyperbola began by our founders on April 15th of 2017. The site went live May 20th of 2017 and our first stable version on was released July 13th of 2017.
The origin of Hyperbola name
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 the 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.
Why should you use Hyperbola?
Hyperbola offers stability, security, privacy and software freedom in addition to empowering the users. We combine freedom, privacy and stability. This provides a Long Term Support (LTS) system that is simple to manage, simple to package, and simple to customize. You can build your own operating system in the way you want and learn a lot along the way.
Hyperbola is a new paradigm and is nevertheless complete independent in the way of building.
GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG)
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 (GNU FSDG). 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.
Init Freedom Campaign
Our objective is to support the Init Freedom Campaign. It is about restoring a sane approach to PID1, one that respects diversity and freedom of choice. We refuse init systems that breaks portability, ignores backwards compatibility, and replaces existing services, forcing into adoption.
Privacy
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.
Long Term Support (LTS)
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 systems 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.
Stability
The job of Hyperbola, independently of Freedom is, and always is, to develop an own and independent operating-system.
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". ;-)
Hyperbola is not based on other distributions
As is described in this entire page, Hyperbola is a fully free long-term support system using the package-management from Arch GNU/Linux and patchsets from Debian development, with special emphasis on stability, privacy, security and init freedom.
We support the Init Freedom Campaign made by Devuan and did further a hard-fork for several components in use. This means we develop our own versions of libretools and pacman.
To summarize
Hyperbola is a fully free, stable, secure, versatile, simple and long-term support system designed to fit the needs of the competent user. It is both powerful and easy to manage, making it an ideal distro for servers and workstations. Take it in any direction you like. But please be also aware, that we don't see it as our task to educate you without giving something back. You have to bring interest and the will with you to research on your own. If you share this vision of what a system should be, then you are welcomed and encouraged to use it freely, get involved, and contribute to the community. Welcome to Hyperbola!