We grew up admiring Steve Jobs’ obsession with taste, restraint, and the courage to say no.
Not the mythology — the discipline.
There’s no real competition for Mac hardware.
The fit. The feel. The quiet confidence.
It’s simply the best machine you can sit in front of.
But Linux runs the internet.
And if you’re a developer, serious work eventually means Linux — even on a Mac. You need to replicate production. You need to test against real deployment environments. You need Linux that behaves like Linux, not Linux through layers of abstraction.
Existing solutions felt like compromises — broad tools built to satisfy every possible use case, every legacy assumption, every edge case from another era. They worked, technically. But they felt wrong. Heavy. Noisy. One size fits all always comes with a cost.
When Apple introduced the Virtualization Framework, something clicked.
A native primitive — narrow, opinionated, and built specifically for macOS and Apple Silicon.
If Linux was going to run on a Mac, this was the foundation. Not emulation weighed down by legacy — but virtualization that respected the hardware it ran on.
Of course, there were limits.
No native support for Linux filesystems like ext4. No tooling to create or resize disk images on macOS. And no interest from us in stitching together a workflow with third-party dependencies.
So we did what felt right.
We adapted the Linux filesystem utilities to run natively on Mac — the tools required to work with ext4, to create and resize disk images directly, cleanly, and without compromise.
Something that shouldn’t be possible on macOS. We made it possible.
That solved the Mac problem. But the Linux problem remained.
Modern distributions have grown careless. Kernels bloated with drivers for hardware that vanished years ago. ISOs expanding because nobody ever stopped to ask, do we still need this?
So instead of trimming around the edges, we went back to first principles.
A typical Linux kernel configuration file runs 7,000 to 10,000 lines. Ours is 700. A 90% reduction — not through shortcuts, but through precision. Every line intentional. Every option considered.
The result is a single kernel binary.
No bootloader.
No initramfs.
Just the kernel, crafted with purpose for Apple Silicon.
We took Ubuntu — 2.7 GB — and compressed it to 78 MB.
Fedora to 65 MB.
Alpine to 13 MB.
No features removed. No compromises made. Just everything unnecessary stripped away.
SSH keys inject automatically during installation. From download to a working Linux shell: under 30 seconds. Boot time is shockingly fast. This is how Linux should feel — immediate, present, ready.
There’s something almost nostalgic about it. This was the spirit when Linus wrote the first kernel. Small. Fast. Yours.
We call it Hylyx — The hyper Linux.
A complete Linux system that fits in megabytes, not gigabytes. Built to boot fast, stay quiet, and get out of the way.
Use it for development — replicate actual production deployments on your Mac without the overhead. Test against real Linux behavior, not abstracted approximations.
Or deploy it in infrastructure where power efficiency matters. There’s no hardware that matches Apple Silicon’s performance per watt. Some of our own datacenters will run on Mac and Hylyx where power constraints demand it.
And we’re open-sourcing it.
No black boxes.
No magic.
Everything visible — from kernel choices to tooling.
If you want to understand it, you can.
If you want to improve it, you’re welcome to.
This isn’t a distribution for everyone. Not a toolbox for every possible workflow.
It’s a Linux system built with intent — designed to run right on a Mac, not merely run at all.
Hylyx is a reflection of our passion for engineering, simplicity, and minimalism. A passion project that reflects our relentless effort to do things the right way.
Try it. Fall in love. This kind of beauty is rare.