I just found about this distro, which is relatively new (2021). Its specificity is that it doesn’t features any GNU software by default, which I find interesting.
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I was confused.
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Oof, the most recent news posting is “entering alpha phase” which is a big no thanks for me. In addition, the main descriptive sentence says “It aims to be clean and usable while addressing the various shortcomings of an average Linux distribution.” But then doesn’t explain that. What does it consider to be shortcomings of an average distro?
Sounds like an interesting systemd free Linux distro and what’s not to like about the BSD userland. Thanks for sharing.
What’s wrong with GNU?
It’s not about GNU being wrong or not, it’s about having the choice.
Yeah, you have the choice of have your software be controlled by companies that could just stop licensing it.
But to Lakso’s question, the point of GNU is to disallow closing down sources. Companies don’t like that, because it’s not profitable. They need non gnu stuff so that they can build money printing closed gardens with it.
It’s not Unix.
I’ve HURD that
🥁 🐍
I see what you did there…
People are going to focus on the GNU free aspect, and I like that about Chimera. That is not the right way to understand the project though.
The creator of Chimera Linux was one of the core contributors to Void Linux. Chimera is an attempt to create a distro with a similar technical philosophy from somebody that thinks they can do better with slightly different choices.
Just use Alpine. Chimera uses Alpine’s package manager anyway. The only reason you havent heard about Alpine in this context is because they do not claim they are doing anything revolutionary, they just strive to make a great distro.
Alpine is also GNU-free afaik.
EDIT: Except for the GCC toolchain.
This means Chimera is not a GNU/Linux system, as it utilizes neither GNU utilities, nor GNU libc, nor GNU toolchain. The system is bootstrappable almost entirely without any GNU components (other than make) and is capable of booting without them (however, most people will have some).
I’d guess they’ll move to some bsd make at some point.
Good luck with that, with the amount of Programmers that use the Gnuism for make, I would say that no developer can patch that amount of software
Uh. That would be huge undertaking indeed.
Let me guess all these makefile generators create gnu-style makefiles too?
Didn’t know that those projects existed, I have always written makefiles from begining based myself on the dwm makefiles :)
But a quick Google search and the first project that appears say that:
A simple makefile generator that can generate makefiles for: GNU-make targeting MinGW, clang-cl or MSVC.
This is kind of intriguing. I like FreeBSD’s userland tools a lot better. Have you tried running it? If not, I might see what it’s all about. The GNU toolchain is a mixed bag. Some of it is really well documented, some stuff average, and others is just a dog’s breakfast.
I have been running it for a while. It is mostly awesome.
A non-trivial amount of software assumes Glibc though and so you will have the odd hiccup because of MUSL. I think one of the goals of Chimera is to improve that situation.
I have one old laptop where I installed Gentoo with musl+llvm profile. It’s fun to tinker with. If I need to run any game binaries, I guess I’d need to run some containers…
I only learnt about it today, so I couldn’t check it. I have this project of building my own distro using musl and a non GNU userland, and it is a very annoying process, so I felt like I should share this one.
I can only imagine that this project is not an easy one! Wishing you the best with it.
This is nice. Shame it won’t support systemd.
