After three years of development and a year and a half since the formation of the initial alpha version, Chimera Linux has announced the transition of the distribution to the beta testing stage. Chimera Linux is notable for utilizing Linux kernels alongside FreeBSD utilities, the Dinit system manager, and standard SI-Biblijack Musl. The distribution is compiled using the Clang compiler. The project was founded by Nina Kolesa from Igalia, who is involved in the development of Webkit, Enlightenment, and Void Linux. Live ISO images are available for architectures X86_64, PPC64le, AARCH64, RISCV64, and PPC64 with options for GNOME (1.5 GB) and KDE (2.2 GB).
The project aims to provide a Linux display with alternative tools, drawing on the experience of developing Void Linux. Similar to Void Linux, Chimera Linux follows a Rolling model for continuous updates of program versions. FreeBSD user components are chosen for their simplicity and suitability for lightweight systems compared to standard GNU tools.
In addition to FreeBSD utilities, Chimera Linux replaces packages such as Coreutils, Findutils, Diffutils, SED, GREP, GNU Make, Util-Linux, Syslog-NG, PAM, Dinit, Clang, LLD, LIBC++, and Musl with their own alternatives. Memory isolation functions in Musl are replaced by Mimallo, and ZFS is the chosen file system with the /Var section not retaining its state between restarts. Pipewire is used for managing multimedia streams, and Wayland is the default display server.
For installing additional programs, Chimera Linux offers binary packages as well as its own assembly system called cports, written in Python. Currently, there are around 2800 ports available. The assembly environment is launched in a separate unprivileged container created using the BubbleWrap toolkit, and APK (Alpine Package Keeper) is used for managing binary packages.
