6 ms·

A Month on Chimera Linux

44 points by susam 3y ago

smitty1e 3y ago
The chied point here seems to be the non-GNU (other than Make) chassis. Other than that, just running Alpine would seem less "exciting".
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I'm not sure i follow; Alpine is already not GNU? (At least, not at runtime (coreutils/libc); I think it might use GCC.) That said, an actual BSD/Linux is neat just like a GNU/BSD system (RIP Debian/kFreeBSD:(... ).
  - smitty1e 3y ago
    Chimera is as non-GNU as possible. Beside that, I don't see what Chimera offers beyond Alpine.
    - q66 3y ago
      i don't think that statement makes much sense considering these two are not similar at all chimera provides a comprehensive, opinionated OS, and little to nothing is common with alpine (not even the package manager, as apkv3 hasn't been deployed anywhere else) it's probably the only linux distribution that has actual goal of having service management and other things practically comparable to systemd without using systemd, including first-class and built-in support for user services, session tracking and others; it utilizes stronger userland hardening than alpine (including e.g. clang CFI, until now only really deployed in android as far as linux distros go), has a superior (faster, more powerful, more secure) packaging infrastructure, and so on and so on as for non-GNUness, it's more of a how it turned out thing and a means to an end, not a goal or a selling point in itself (it never really was that), however any sort of "why not use GNU" question is itself fallacious, considering this is a from-scratch project and there are always choices to be made (and there is no reason not to choose the one that fits better and provides practical advantages) the faq has a lot of more detailed information: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq
dxxvi 3y ago
Why does the top panel of the terminal take so much space? Is it a gnome thing? I wonder what she/he ran that took 6166MB. CLion?
- wezm 3y ago
  Yes that’s a GNOME thing. It doesn’t take much to fill up 8Gb these days. I had a few different things running on other workspaces when I took that screenshot: Firefox with a bunch of tabs, CLion (usually good for ~2Gb), Obsidian, some other stuff.
  - q66 3y ago
    it's actually just virtual memory, neofetch uses that instead of real memory consumption and the scudo allocator tends to be heavy on reserving virtual memory (actually much more so in the default configuration used in e.g. android than in ours, as i've already put some effort into optimizing that), it's harmless in most configurations (the real memory usage is much lower) though i still plan to look into that more later
lemper 3y ago
iirc, plain linux cannot be compiled without gcc. pretty sure there's this project (which, for the life of me, i can't remember the namełthat makes it possible to do so. so, does chimaera uses that project's work?
- reocha 3y ago
  The Linux kernel can be compiled using llvm: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/kbuild/llvm.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/kbuild/llvm.html
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  That used to be true, but the work to compile Linux with clang was mainlined a while ago now. And IIRC Google builds their kernels with it (including Android and ChromeOS) so it's definitely getting used/tested.
- wezm 3y ago
  In addition to what reocha said, ClangBuiltLinux is the project you're probably thinking of. They track issues building with clang and provide CI: https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/ https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/
yonatan8070 3y ago
I don't entirely understand why one wouldn't want GNU on their system, what's wrong with it? Is it just a case of "it's popular so it's bad"?
- q66 3y ago
  fortunately, there is a FAQ which answers that and other things: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#so-why-use-a-bsd-based-userland-anyway https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#so-why-use-a-bsd-based-us...
- andomizeazzz662 3y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as to say there is something wrong with GNU. For those of us that got our start on more traditional UNIX's, GNU can feel a bit over engineered at times. A couple of pet-peeves: 1. Bloated codebase for common utilities (I recognize this is very subjective). This doesn't apply to all GNU programs, but it certainly applies more than it does for the BSDs or commercial Unix's. Bash is a nasty shell implementation in my opinion, and there are an enormous number of non-standard options included in various basic utility programs. A traditional Unix shell distributed in an OS base ought to look much more like the ash you find in busybox or dash than GNU bash. Don't take this to mean I think everything should be a single binary. 2. Due to the bloated codebase, it's much more difficult to customize. It used to be very common for people to write their own customizations of utilities when they needed additional functionality. If everything expects GNU features, that becomes very challenging because those are not codebases that are very easy to hop into and understand over a weekend. This is how I got my start doing systems programming, and I worry that the next generation won't have the same opportunity as these things are hidden underneath a sea of complexities. 3. The C compiler and libc implementations suffer from similar problems and are similarly opinionated and larger than they had been traditionally on other Unix implementations. 4. There has been no attempt similar to POSIX of the SUS to write down a standard that others can follow. You are forced to follow a "GNU standard", but there has been no serious attempt to put any of this new defacto standard in writing. So a lot of systems programmers still prefer to stick to bare bones POSIX because it provides guidelines that the GNU project does not provide. I feel that they have at least some level of moral responsibility to put standards in writing and adhere to them given the amount of software that relies on these interfaces. There have been numerous instances of changes in GNU programs that have been handled haphazardly and without sufficient documentation or notice. For a project as dominant and mature as GNU, this ought to be considered unacceptable. 5. I don't necessarily disagree with the principles of the FSF or GNU project. I'm not a hardliner on using BSD style licenses or anything like that. However, there is certainly a political vibe you get from the GNU project and it's software that maybe isn't entirely appropriate for how important a project it has grown to be. The Linux Foundation and the kernel team has generally figured this out and done a fantastic job over the years, but the GNU project has not really matured in the same way. These have all been negatives relating to GNU software so far, but there is also an equally long list that could be written of positives about the LLVM suite and various non GNU userlands. For some people that are maybe less irked by the GNU issues than I am, they still could benefit from having LLVM rather than gcc in a lot of cases. It's a much more impressive set of technologies in general and is now mature enough that we ought to evaluate their use as a systems compiler suite. I'd like to conclude by saying I really appreciate the work that the GNU project has done over the years. They deserve all of our support for all the good work they've done and continue to do, and their programs will certainly continue to be around for a long time and used heavily. However, I think it's time that we try to provide at least a minimal set of viable alternatives.
suprjami 3y ago
Every time I see this post I get excited because I think it's ChimeraOS, which is like Steam Deck but for regular PCs. I've had that on a NUC8 with a PS4 controller and it's a fantastic TV gaming experience. That's much more exciting than this.
- lproven 3y ago
  Au contraire. For those of us interested in OSes and tech, and not video games, anything to do with consoles is dull, dull, dull. (I used to play games, in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, when the hardware was so poor it was all about gameplay not graphics. Now it's all about super-slick 3D graphics by teams of hundreds, and the gameplay has just gone away. They all look the same and play the same. There are 3 games in the 21st century I have found worth playing: Guitar Hero, Portal, and Untitled Goose Game. Everything else is just 3D shooting, but with slick graphics, and it's boring.)
  - graynk 3y ago
    > Everything else is just 3D shooting, but with slick graphics, and it's boring. That’s just quite simply not true, but I’m guessing you aren’t really looking to be disproved, or you would have found myriads of other worthy and unique games beyond those 3, both indie and AAA
    - unforeseen9991 3y ago
      Like Factorio, possibly the best game ever made
      - lproven 3y ago
        Looks like another god game: a large-scale systems sim. I played _Hamurabi_ in 1981 or something, and it was dull then, and it's never got less dull. Modelling, construction of large complex systems, of any kind, is not my idea of a fun activity. Wrapping it in pretty graphics does not make it any more appealing. Perfectly happy for others to enjoy it. I am not saying there is anything wrong with it. Not criticising here. Just saying it's not for me.
nazgulsenpai 3y ago
Chimera Linux is pretty interesting and have been meaning to give it a try. I have used Void Linux as my daily driver for about a year now and love it, and the creator of Chimera Linux used to maintain the Void Linux PowerPC project before dropping it for Chimera fulltime: https://voidlinux-ppc.org/news/2022/09/repo-update.html https://voidlinux-ppc.org/news/2022/09/repo-update.html

44 points by susam 3y ago

The chied point here seems to be the non-GNU (other than Make) chassis. Other than that, just running Alpine would seem less "exciting".

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I'm not sure i follow; Alpine is already not GNU? (At least, not at runtime (coreutils/libc); I think it might use GCC.) That said, an actual BSD/Linux is neat just like a GNU/BSD system (RIP Debian/kFreeBSD:(... ).
- smitty1e 3y ago
  Chimera is as non-GNU as possible. Beside that, I don't see what Chimera offers beyond Alpine.
  - q66 3y ago
    i don't think that statement makes much sense considering these two are not similar at all chimera provides a comprehensive, opinionated OS, and little to nothing is common with alpine (not even the package manager, as apkv3 hasn't been deployed anywhere else) it's probably the only linux distribution that has actual goal of having service management and other things practically comparable to systemd without using systemd, including first-class and built-in support for user services, session tracking and others; it utilizes stronger userland hardening than alpine (including e.g. clang CFI, until now only really deployed in android as far as linux distros go), has a superior (faster, more powerful, more secure) packaging infrastructure, and so on and so on as for non-GNUness, it's more of a how it turned out thing and a means to an end, not a goal or a selling point in itself (it never really was that), however any sort of "why not use GNU" question is itself fallacious, considering this is a from-scratch project and there are always choices to be made (and there is no reason not to choose the one that fits better and provides practical advantages) the faq has a lot of more detailed information: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq

dxxvi 3y ago

Why does the top panel of the terminal take so much space? Is it a gnome thing? I wonder what she/he ran that took 6166MB. CLion?

wezm 3y ago
Yes that’s a GNOME thing. It doesn’t take much to fill up 8Gb these days. I had a few different things running on other workspaces when I took that screenshot: Firefox with a bunch of tabs, CLion (usually good for ~2Gb), Obsidian, some other stuff.
- q66 3y ago
  it's actually just virtual memory, neofetch uses that instead of real memory consumption and the scudo allocator tends to be heavy on reserving virtual memory (actually much more so in the default configuration used in e.g. android than in ours, as i've already put some effort into optimizing that), it's harmless in most configurations (the real memory usage is much lower) though i still plan to look into that more later

lemper 3y ago

iirc, plain linux cannot be compiled without gcc. pretty sure there's this project (which, for the life of me, i can't remember the namełthat makes it possible to do so. so, does chimaera uses that project's work?

reocha 3y ago
The Linux kernel can be compiled using llvm: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/kbuild/llvm.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/kbuild/llvm.html
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
That used to be true, but the work to compile Linux with clang was mainlined a while ago now. And IIRC Google builds their kernels with it (including Android and ChromeOS) so it's definitely getting used/tested.
wezm 3y ago
In addition to what reocha said, ClangBuiltLinux is the project you're probably thinking of. They track issues building with clang and provide CI: https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/ https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/

yonatan8070 3y ago

I don't entirely understand why one wouldn't want GNU on their system, what's wrong with it? Is it just a case of "it's popular so it's bad"?

q66 3y ago
fortunately, there is a FAQ which answers that and other things: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#so-why-use-a-bsd-based-userland-anyway https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#so-why-use-a-bsd-based-us...
andomizeazzz662 3y ago
I wouldn't go as far as to say there is something wrong with GNU. For those of us that got our start on more traditional UNIX's, GNU can feel a bit over engineered at times. A couple of pet-peeves: 1. Bloated codebase for common utilities (I recognize this is very subjective). This doesn't apply to all GNU programs, but it certainly applies more than it does for the BSDs or commercial Unix's. Bash is a nasty shell implementation in my opinion, and there are an enormous number of non-standard options included in various basic utility programs. A traditional Unix shell distributed in an OS base ought to look much more like the ash you find in busybox or dash than GNU bash. Don't take this to mean I think everything should be a single binary. 2. Due to the bloated codebase, it's much more difficult to customize. It used to be very common for people to write their own customizations of utilities when they needed additional functionality. If everything expects GNU features, that becomes very challenging because those are not codebases that are very easy to hop into and understand over a weekend. This is how I got my start doing systems programming, and I worry that the next generation won't have the same opportunity as these things are hidden underneath a sea of complexities. 3. The C compiler and libc implementations suffer from similar problems and are similarly opinionated and larger than they had been traditionally on other Unix implementations. 4. There has been no attempt similar to POSIX of the SUS to write down a standard that others can follow. You are forced to follow a "GNU standard", but there has been no serious attempt to put any of this new defacto standard in writing. So a lot of systems programmers still prefer to stick to bare bones POSIX because it provides guidelines that the GNU project does not provide. I feel that they have at least some level of moral responsibility to put standards in writing and adhere to them given the amount of software that relies on these interfaces. There have been numerous instances of changes in GNU programs that have been handled haphazardly and without sufficient documentation or notice. For a project as dominant and mature as GNU, this ought to be considered unacceptable. 5. I don't necessarily disagree with the principles of the FSF or GNU project. I'm not a hardliner on using BSD style licenses or anything like that. However, there is certainly a political vibe you get from the GNU project and it's software that maybe isn't entirely appropriate for how important a project it has grown to be. The Linux Foundation and the kernel team has generally figured this out and done a fantastic job over the years, but the GNU project has not really matured in the same way. These have all been negatives relating to GNU software so far, but there is also an equally long list that could be written of positives about the LLVM suite and various non GNU userlands. For some people that are maybe less irked by the GNU issues than I am, they still could benefit from having LLVM rather than gcc in a lot of cases. It's a much more impressive set of technologies in general and is now mature enough that we ought to evaluate their use as a systems compiler suite. I'd like to conclude by saying I really appreciate the work that the GNU project has done over the years. They deserve all of our support for all the good work they've done and continue to do, and their programs will certainly continue to be around for a long time and used heavily. However, I think it's time that we try to provide at least a minimal set of viable alternatives.

suprjami 3y ago

Every time I see this post I get excited because I think it's ChimeraOS, which is like Steam Deck but for regular PCs. I've had that on a NUC8 with a PS4 controller and it's a fantastic TV gaming experience. That's much more exciting than this.

lproven 3y ago
Au contraire. For those of us interested in OSes and tech, and not video games, anything to do with consoles is dull, dull, dull. (I used to play games, in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, when the hardware was so poor it was all about gameplay not graphics. Now it's all about super-slick 3D graphics by teams of hundreds, and the gameplay has just gone away. They all look the same and play the same. There are 3 games in the 21st century I have found worth playing: Guitar Hero, Portal, and Untitled Goose Game. Everything else is just 3D shooting, but with slick graphics, and it's boring.)
- graynk 3y ago
  > Everything else is just 3D shooting, but with slick graphics, and it's boring. That’s just quite simply not true, but I’m guessing you aren’t really looking to be disproved, or you would have found myriads of other worthy and unique games beyond those 3, both indie and AAA
  - unforeseen9991 3y ago
    Like Factorio, possibly the best game ever made
    - lproven 3y ago
      Looks like another god game: a large-scale systems sim. I played _Hamurabi_ in 1981 or something, and it was dull then, and it's never got less dull. Modelling, construction of large complex systems, of any kind, is not my idea of a fun activity. Wrapping it in pretty graphics does not make it any more appealing. Perfectly happy for others to enjoy it. I am not saying there is anything wrong with it. Not criticising here. Just saying it's not for me.

nazgulsenpai 3y ago

Chimera Linux is pretty interesting and have been meaning to give it a try. I have used Void Linux as my daily driver for about a year now and love it, and the creator of Chimera Linux used to maintain the Void Linux PowerPC project before dropping it for Chimera fulltime: https://voidlinux-ppc.org/news/2022/09/repo-update.html https://voidlinux-ppc.org/news/2022/09/repo-update.html