We’ve talked about Chimera Linux before – it’s a unique Linux distribution that combines a BSD userland with the LLVM/Clang toolchain, and musl. Its init system is dinit, and it uses apk-tools from Alpine as its package manager. None of this has anything to do with being anti-anything; the choice of BSD’s tools and userland is mostly technical in nature. Chimera Linux is available for x86-64, AArch64, RISC-V, and POWER (both little and big endian). I am unreasonably excited for Chimera Linux, for a variety of reasons – first, I love the above set of choices they made, and second, Chimera Linux’ founder and lead developer, q66, is a well-known and respected name in this space. She not only founded Chimera Linux, but also used to maintain the POWER/PowerPC ports of Void Linux, which is the port of Void Linux I used on my POWER9 hardware. She apparently also contributed quite a bit to Enlightenment, and is currently employed by Igalia, through which she can work on Chimera. With the description out of the way, here’s the news: Chimera Linux has officially entered beta. Today we have updated apk-tools to an rc tag. With this, the project is now entering beta phase, after around a year and a half. In general, this does not actually mean much, as the project is rolling release and updates will simply keep coming. It is more of an acknowledgement of current status, though new images will be released in the coming days. ↫ Chimera Linux’s website Despite my excitement, I haven’t yet tried Chimera Linux myself, as I figured its pre-beta stage wasn’t meant for an idiot like me who can’t contribute anything meaningful, and I’d rather not clutter the airwaves. Now that it’s entered beta, I feel like the time is getting riper and riper for me to dive in, and perhaps write about it here. Since the goal of Chimera Linux is to be a general-purpose distribution, I think I’m right in the proper demographic of users. It helps that I’m about to set up my dual-processor POWER9 machine again, and I think I’ll be going with Chimera Linux. As a final note, you may have noticed I consistently refer to it as “Chimera Linux”. This is very much on purpose, as there’s also something called ChimeraOS, a more standard Linux distribution aimed at gaming. To avoid confusion, I figured I’d keep the naming clear and consistent.
