Chimera Linux works toward a simplified desktop [LWN.net]

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By Daroc Alden
January 13, 2025

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.

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