Chimera Linux works toward a simplified desktop

Chimera Linux is a new distribution designed to be "simple, transparent, and easy to pick up". The distribution is built from scratch, and recently announced its first beta release. While the documentation and installation process are both a bit rough, the project already provides a usable desktop with plenty of useful software — one built primarily on tools adopted from BSD.

Chimera Linux was started by "q66" (who previously worked on Void Linux) in 2021 with the goal of creating a modern distribution that could "eliminate legacy cruft where possible" to provide a simple, practical desktop. In service of that goal, the project is based on BSD tools. Chimera's frequently asked questions page explains that unlike other projects that use those tools for licensing reasons, project picked BSD tools for their smaller code size and reduced complexity. Bootstrapping a modern Linux distribution is quite complex, with many packages that depend on other packages; using BSD tools allowed the project to avoid a lot of that complexity. For example, Chimera uses musl as its C library, which cuts out a lot of dependencies from the GNU C library.

Some people may also say that the BSD licensing is its own benefit. We do not say that, because as far as core userland goes, the licensing is more or less meaningless for us and we could easily live with the GPL. Therefore, this is largely a technical decision for us. While the benefits may seem small to some, they are there, and they matter to the project.

That same drive for simplicity also motivated the project to eschew systemd. The project's documentation calls systemd's implementation "rather messy", but also acknowledges that "it has been a net functional improvement for Linux". Chimera acknowledges that systemd has a lot of features and tools, but ended up deciding that the cost of maintaining compatibility with how systemd expects a Linux system to behave is just too high.

At the same time, the project specifically disavows any association with "the so-called 'systemd-free community', which tends to spread a lot of misconceptions and frankly deranged opinions that [end] up hurting any sort of positive effort." Chimera Linux is focused on building a simplified, usable Linux system — and not on getting into fights about what software the contributors do or do not use to get there. This pragmatic approach has been attractive to contributors, and now q66 has been joined by Isaac Freund (a contributor to Zig and the author of waylock) as a co-maintainer, and more than a hundred other contributors.

But the choice to eschew systemd itself causes a number of problems for the distribution. For example, systemd's logind daemon handles tracking user sessions; without systemd, Chimera needs another solution for that. The project's current approach is a standalone fork of logind called elogind, but the eventual plan is to develop an API that works with both logind and any other session-tracking software. The project's documentation cites this as another benefit of choosing less common software: it presents an opportunity to try to improve the portability of existing programs.

For service management, Chimera uses the Dinit init system, which also has a focus on portability. Dinit offers some of the same core features of systemd — a daemon that supervises system services based on a configuration, including user services — but delegates everything outside that core scope to other programs. Chimera supports several architectures, including x86_64, ppc64, ppc64le, aarch64, and riscv64.

Installation

Chimera Linux does not yet have a graphical installer. The installation process is done mostly by hand, from a live image. People who have previously installed Arch or Gentoo will find the process familiar. The project publishes several live images to use, including a minimal, console-only version, a GNOME version, and a KDE Plasma version. Users who haven't previously had a reason to install a Linux system without the aid of an installer will probably find using the GNOME or KDE version easiest, so that they can refer to the online documentation as they go.

Regardless of which live image is used, the process is the same: configure disk partitions (with cfdisk), set up file systems, mount them in the desired configuration, and then set up the system inside a chroot. The installation documentation contains a section on partitioning, including suggestions for different architectures. Chimera supports many different configurations, leaving the user free to carve up their disk as they please — but does not support having /usr on a separate partition. Chimera is "fully /usr merged", and stores some programs that are needed to mount disks and fully boot the system there.

Once disks and filesystems are set up, the chimera-bootstrap tool sets up the minimum required tooling for the new installation; by default, this consists of packages fetched from Chimera's package repository, but it can also be instructed to copy the packages from the live image for offline installations. Chimera uses Alpine Package Keeper (APK), Alpine Linux's package manager, but its packages are not derived from Alpine's. APK can be used to install additional software — including a kernel and bootloader, at a minimum, since chimera-bootstrap doesn't include either of those, perhaps so that users can have a choice of which kernel package to install. The sections in the installation documentation make a de-facto checklist for what needs to be set up before rebooting into the new installation, but the documentation is really more a list of ways that a user could choose to configure things than a prescriptive set of steps to follow.

Software

Most users will want to install a desktop environment, which also doesn't come by default (although the package for the corresponding desktop environment is available on the live image, for offline installations). Chimera's recommended desktop is GNOME (using Wayland, but X11 is also supported), but several others are packaged for the distribution. When installing GNOME, there isn't much software installed by default. It comes with the Web browser, along with the other basic tools from Apps for GNOME.

More common software, such as Firefox and LibreOffice, is available from the package repository, however, which has nearly 10,000 packages available. Since Chimera doesn't ship the GNU C library, software that relies on it will not work. Most software is able to use musl, but pre-compiled binaries, such as proprietary software, tends to break. If the user needs applications that require it anyway, the documentation recommends installing Flatpak and using that to run such software in a more typical container.

The choice of BSD tools and lack of systemd don't really impact the day-to-day use of the system; other than substituting doas for sudo, the other command line software that I use in a normal day worked just fine. For development, however, some software is conspicuously missing; Chimera doesn't package GCC for all its architectures, for example, although it does package GCC as a cross-compiler for aarch64, arm, and riscv64. The default C compiler is Clang, and tools such as make and [Edit: GNU make is now the default] tar use the BSD versions by default, even when the GNU versions are packaged.

Updates are fairly simple; APK is not a BSD-style system that builds installed software from scratch, but rather a normal Linux package manager. The distribution hosts pre-compiled binary packages, but the packages can also be compiled by hand from the definitions. There are a handful of contributors making sure important software stays up to date, but in my research I wasn't able to find a documented process for security updates — something the distribution will almost certainly need as it grows.

Overall, Chimera Linux seems to have made a good step toward its goal of creating a simplified Linux desktop. The distribution is definitely usable, and offers a good amount of flexibility for experienced users, while still being relatively simple. Still, there are some rough spots. The manual and somewhat idiosyncratic installation process will put some people off — and the people who wouldn't be put off are probably expert users who have their own existing setups.

The future

In 2025, the project plans to focus on smoothing out a handful of sharp edges, mostly related to doing service management without systemd. In particular, making progress toward the goal of removing elogind and replacing it with a custom solution. Planning, discussion about development, and user support all happen on IRC in OFTC's #chimera-linux channel, or in the bridged Matrix channel. There is also a somewhat active Reddit community and an official Mastodon account for the project, which shares progress updates.

Chimera's alpha phase took a year and a half, from June 2023 to December 2024; if the beta takes the same amount of time, it could see a 1.0 release in 2026. On the other hand, the project has grown quickly, so it may reach a stable release sooner rather than later. Where exactly Chimera will be in another 18 months, and whether it will prove useful to more than it's current small yet dedicated community, remains to be seen.