16 ms·

Chimera Linux

267 points by MaximilianEmel 3y ago

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- deleted 3y ago
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suprjami 3y ago
> Chimera is a general-purpose OS born from unhappiness with the state of Linux distributions. It's built around the core idea that a simple system does not have to require endless setup and customization to be practical. This seems disingenuous at best. Many distros already supply this feature. Debian is the most notable but there are many others. Install it, make any tweaks you want from the base install, sit on it for many years unchanged. Considering the next paragraph goes on to describe OpenBSD userland, LLVM compiler, and musl libc, it appears the aim is actually to build a Linux distribution without GNU. I usually steer away from projects which are defined by what they are not. It seems to build a community whose roots are based in hostility.
- mig39 3y ago
  > If that's the aim then just state that. At the top of the first page, under the Chimera Linux logo: "A modern, general-purpose non-GNU Linux distribution"
- darkwater 3y ago
  Came here to paste the same quote, just to highlight how disconnected from reality can be advertising "does not have to require endless setup" and then describe a rolling update distro, focused on power users and based on FreeBSD userland with a Linux kernel.
- fmoralesc 3y ago
  Not just not GNU: they also ditch systemd for dinit, syslog-ng and a bunch of homegrown plumbing: > We are also putting a lot of effort into writing fresh low-level plumbing. For example, Chimera comes with first-class and built-in support for user services and other things dependent on session tracking (such as a shared session bus), implemented from scratch thanks to our Turnstile project, finally bringing functionality previously only available on distributions using systemd. This is being implemented in a vendor-independent manner so that other distributions can adopt it.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Good to know. That was my first question. I hope this means they also get rid of nonsense like pulseaudio and logind. I’m a bit skeptical of the “shared session bus” though. Linux supports inode watches for things that want to react to configuration changes, and session busses add a ton of complexity (including a second authorization language, and a userland SPOF)
    - NewJazz 3y ago
      They use pipewire IIRC (which is 1.0 now!!). And they have a custom alternative to login AIUI.
      - MBCook 3y ago
        They’re working on it. The reason is explained in the FAQ. For now they seem to be using a different alternative to do at least some of it. I think it was called elogind?
- LeFantome 3y ago
  “I usually steer away from projects which are defined by what they are not. It seems to build a community whose roots are based in hostility.” This is a somewhat ironic indictment of a project opting to avoid GNU. In fact, your quote could serve as a valid argument to avoid GNU. I cannot think of a project more completely defined by what it is not. I would certainly find it difficult to argue that GNU and its founder have not been a source of discord and hostility. The Open Source movement is a direct response to the hostile politics of GNU and Free Software. In the case of Chimera Linux though, the founder has been pretty clear that they made their choices for engineering reasons and not political ones. There are lots of GNU packages in Chimera if you want them.
  - xcv123 3y ago
    GNU is defined as what it is; that it is an operating system and that it is free software. "What is GNU? GNU is an operating system that is free software—that is, it respects users' freedom." https://www.gnu.org https://www.gnu.org Although GNU stands for "GNU is NOT Unix" that doesn't count as its a boomer hacker meme that started before GNU.
    - akosoaaafjdr 3y ago
      I'll add that most anti-GNU people I know in the BSD space and related projects are not at all against GNU politically speaking or it's ideals or the free software movement. We mostly think that a variety of terrible technical decisions have been made and allowed to metastisize over the years, and that they are largely unfixable so long as Linux remains an operating system devoted primarily to ease of use, popularity, and packaged for non-professionals. A lot of this happened rather early on due to the influx of hobbyist programmers from the PC space, and so I think the GNU userland was mostly doomed from the beginning due to the qualifications (or lack thereof) of its programmers when important foundational design choices were made (they are better programmers and more professionally qualified these days, but they aren't about to roll back most of these foundational mistakes because it would collapse the whole thing like a tower of Jenga blocks). Those goals actually align a lot with the GNU philosophies and so I support the Linux community fully in that way and for making free software available to as many as possible. But technically speaking, GNU userland is a pile of dog shit, and you've really got to rip it out and start from scratch like Chimera is doing as a bare minimum to actually make any kind of progress there.
- deleted 3y ago
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- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
  There is this bit (emphasis mine) >This means Chimera is not a GNU/Linux system, as it utilizes neither GNU utilities, nor GNU libc, nor GNU toolchain. However, *the project is not anti-GNU/GPL*, and its userland choice is primarily technical. Users are generally free to use whichever software they like. https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland This quote from the faq literally made me laugh out loud: >Another side of the coin is 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 as a project denounces such people, and is explicitly not a part of this community. Such people should also not view Chimera as some sort of haven, because it is not. The project is explicitly anti-elitist and aims to find constructive solutions. https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq Anyway, I wonder if they should be emphasizing security more on their homepage. >Being a single lightweight package, it makes hardening the userland a lot easier too. It is possible to compile the Chimera userland with CFI and other techniques very easily, and it applies to all of the tools. With GNU tools trying to using these tends to fail, and addressing the issues becomes harder because it is out of our control and involves a much chunkier codebase where more can go wrong and where things are harder to track down. https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq I would like to see more security-focused operating systems. And simplicity is obviously quite valuable for security. Perhaps they could find a nice niche as an accessible, UX and desktop-focused competitor to OpenBSD? Qubes is nice for desktop security, but it requires a powerful machine, and also maybe I could run Chimera in a qube some day for defense-in-depth :-) One advantage of a desktop focus is someday you could make money selling laptops with preinstalls. I'll bet a lot of people would buy a cheap security-focused laptop to manage critical accounts, infrastructure, private keys even. Especially big companies that care about security. Then roll your profits into creating a great bug bounty program for your OS, in a virtuous cycle.
- q66 3y ago
  i believe you are just making assumptions here; debian in this context does not count as a "simple system", if anything it's as complex as a distro can be and its packaging approach is a polar opposite of chimera's i still like debian either way, because it's a nice community with good values/principles that has provided and still provides great value to the ecosystem, but it can also often be very fragile the "just works" point of chimera stems from how things are built; everything it comes with is made to be "install and go" without having to go extra length to enable and set it up (while still being entirely transparent to the user), while being deterministic (packages in general don't rely on install hooks etc.) to ensure safe upgrades and easy auditing, and all that in a framework of a system that has a fraction of the complexity of a large distro and is maintainable by a small team we make it consistently clear that it's not a reactionary project (https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq, https://floss.social/@chimera_linux/111553324359284350 https://floss.social/@chimera_linux/111553324359284350, etc) and has no hostility to GNU or any of the projects we use alternatives to by default (and anybody displaying such hostility is unwelcome in the community)
eternityforest 3y ago
It's really cool, but I get worried anytime I see something that seems to want to be a user friendly, mainstream distro, after seeing how hard Manjaro tried with the whole "Bring simplicity to the masses" stuff and how many issues they still have. Is this an experimental or hobby distro or does it intend to be something grandma can use? If I had to choose this or BSD, it looks like I'd very strongly considering this or something like it, but it definitely doesn't seem like an Ubuntu or Windows replacement. Simplicity is just not a factor end users consider. As a dev who likes modern software and isn't really into lightweight hacker friendly stuff... the odds of me using anything that's not at least 1% or total desktop market share is pretty low. Anyone who's not an Arch/Kali/BSD/suckless enthusiast type has a finely tuned sense of "Oh no, that makes me feel the same way that thinking about a project car does, I'm outta here". It could drill be a wonderful worthwhile project... but it's going to be an uphill battle to interest anyone but tinkerers and I always kind of worry about people, because this stuff takes a lot of time and without managed expectations it can really be a disappointment when it doesn't take off. I've tried several times to start new projects and it's been pretty hard realizing they're unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon. I think getting any mainstream adoption would require changing the entire software ecosystem in general. I would imagine there would be some kind of issues trying to port current mega apps like Steam or Chrome to this. Plus, dynamic linking seems like it's not that well suited to user friendly distros meant for end users. Unless you have snap or Flatpak or something like that, I don't see how you can have cutting edge large complex third party packages without at least occasional compatibility issues. My experience with dynamic distros generally hasn't been terrible, but it always seems like there's some issue or other. Does this have any kind of AppArmor type sandboxing?
- gjvc 3y ago
  """Anyone who's not an Arch/Kali/BSD/suckless enthusiast type has a finely tuned sense of "Oh no, that makes me feel the same way that thinking about a project car does, I'm outta here".""" excellent observation
  - gjvc 3y ago
    think I should have said "excellent analogy" but hey-ho
alberth 3y ago
[flagged]
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  They've gone out of their way to use non-GNU tools and libraries.
dataangel 3y ago
So they're basically saying "our system will be better because more things will just work" but then they decided to use nonstandard libc and coreutils so actually getting existing Linux scripts and software to work in this distro will be harder.
- deleted 3y ago
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- torstenvl 3y ago
  Saying musl is non-standard is a serious allegation. Can you expand on that? In what way does it violate the standard?
  - wavemode 3y ago
    I read "nonstandard" in their comment by its dictionary definition ("not average, normal, or usual"). Not that it literally violates a published standard.
    - NewJazz 3y ago
      Most Linux installs are going to be using Bionic libc, so still dubious to call glibc "standard". This is Linux. There is no standard. OpenWRT used uClibc until 2019.
      - xcv123 3y ago
        GNU/Linux is the standard, as in most common. That's where it all started. Android is not used as a desktop or server OS.
        Conscat 3y ago
        Android is used as a desktop OS in a limited capacity among a small group of hackers.
5- 3y ago
i really like a lot of design choices in chimera linux (particularly around its packaging/build system), but as a current alpine linux (main pc, not docker) user, i find i still can't justify musl. i like small simple correct software, but musl, despite being all of those things, is, in my experience - slower than glibc, and in occasionally difficult to predict spots; - causes just a bit too much trouble porting software to it -- most upstreams are reluctant to accept patches, resulting in maintenance overhead for the distribution; - occasionally subtly breaks things at runtime -- e.g. both alpine and chimera builds of firefox have the same two crashes which neither the official mozilla nor archlinux builds exhibit. in the end i find i have to rely on my glibc chroot (e.g. for mozilla firefox build) too much for my liking.
- freedomben 3y ago
  This has been my experience with alpine as well. musl just ends up causing much more trouble than it is worth
  - sidkshatriya 3y ago
    For the longest time using anything but gcc was a problem. But people found clang/llvm better in many respects and persisted. Today clang/llvm is a drop in option, even to compile the Linux kernel. Similarly we should persist with musl. It’s infinitely cleaner, simpler and understandable.
    - musicale 3y ago
      As you imply, it's not really a standard unless there are multiple implementations. I am in favor of standardizing the behavior of libc and having multiple implementations that are commonly used.
      - LeFantome 3y ago
        There are many, many implementations of the C standard library. Every OS has one—even Windows. There are also many other POSIX ( UNIX-like ) operating systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD which have their own. Redox has a Rust-based C library called Relibc that even works on Linux. There are also other C libraries that work on Linux such as dietLibc and of course Bionic, which is the standard C library on Android. The problem is not the lack of a standard, it is that Glibc does not follow the standard and is itself the de facto choice for desktop Linux. Applications that assume Glibc may not work on other implementations ( like MUSL ).
devit 3y ago
"that a simple system does not have to require endless setup and customization to be practical" and "alternative userland" don't go together since obviously any "alternative userland" is going to break lots of stuff and thus require extensive tweaking work.
- q66 3y ago
  they do though, just not in the way you think; in general chimera is designed so that whatever you install from the repositories, it'll yield a working out of the box configuration you want a desktop? you install it and it works; there is no (mandatory) tinkering with getting dbus, audio, wifi/bluetooth, or whatever else to work - most importantly things are set up in a way that installs are consistently deterministic and auditable (there is no reliance on complicated shell hooks or anything of the sort to do any kind of "fixups", most packages consist solely of extraction) sure, when you involve third party shell scripts or whatever, there is a chance you'll run into compatibility troubles, but perhaps not as often as you think either
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    I'm not a "hacker distro guy", so my opinion doesn't matter much, but thisn definitely seems far more interesting than the piles of shell scripts most distros use.
- nine_k 3y ago
  If it's alternative but largely compatible, I don't see a lot of tweaking ahead. If it's materially different, it's mostly going to be learning, before any tweaking.
Levitating 3y ago
> Chimera is a general-purpose OS born from unhappiness with the state of Linux distributions. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ It seems to have a nice build system. But I am not sure this solves any issue any other distribution has. And with the amount of opinionated choices this distribution has I imagine there are few who it fits. I think for many, Void would be a better choice. They do defend/document their choices well. Though I don't know why they'd support that many architectures, I think they might regret that. Anyway I wish this team the best of luck. Who knows, maybe some of their homegrown projects might see use elsewhere.
- natrys 3y ago
  Chimera creator is a former Void dev iirc, maintained the PowerPC arch among other things.
- q66 3y ago
  chimera is designed to solve many issues other distros have; this includes e.g. the poor state of toolchain security hardening (you won't find any other distro with the same practical scope that's more strongly hardened in builds) cbuild is also designed to solve real issues, particularly proper sandboxing and linting of builds to allow for a small team to maintain it while at the same time being fast and ensuring correctness (distro build systems often tend to be bash/make monstrosities that do nowhere near enough where they need to while doing too much where they shouldn't) i used to work on void, and there are good reasons i went to start a new project instead; this includes poor quality packaging for a lot of void stuff (by part caused by xbps-src design choices), poor platform support (all non-x86 stuff is buggy, partly because of cross-compiling and not running unit tests for things being built) and state of infrastructure, design issues of xbps itself (lack of solver, poor implementation of shlibs system and virtual packages, etc.), lacking service management (no oneshots, no transparent/standardized support for user services, no support for dependencies, no support for service-integrated dbus activation etc.), lots of stuff sticks with legacy nonsense where systemd has taken over and improved things in the meantime (e.g. handling of dbus, user management and tmpfiles management, user services as mentioned before, etc), and so on and so on we are also addressing the whole thing with "everybody has adopted systemd and its functionality, and distros without systemd have instead stuck their head in the sand and pretend systemd is the devil and implement none of the stuff people want" which is leading to increased dependence on systemd in various upstreams, and an increasing amount of bad hacks in non-systemd systems supporting a lot of architectures is not something to regret, it's a good goal to have and aids keeping the ecosystem healthy as well as giving people the choice of running the system on hardware they like; any pain caused by supporting multiple archs pays off several times
qweqwe14 3y ago
Chimera was developed by the same person that ported Void Linux to PowerPC https://web.archive.org/web/20230811081600/https://voidlinux-ppc.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230811081600/https://voidlinux... https://voidlinux.org https://voidlinux.org
Loxicon 3y ago
what is non-GNU?
- SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
  See [1]. Essentially the programs which most Linux distributions come with are provided by the GNU project, especially basic infrastructure stuff. Stuff like sed, less, awk, etc. However these programs have cousins in stuff like BSD or Busybox, which implement similar functionality, but have a mostly, or completely separate codebase, and some differences in what they can do and how you make them do it, with a common user-facing one being differences in the command line flags available, and precisely how they behave. In this case, Chimera uses a mix of stuff from FreeBSD and elsewhere, and also uses an alternative toolchain for compiling C, called musl, which is not glibc (glibc being a GNU project). Since Linux distributions that use GNU are almost the universal rule, distros like this describe themsekves as "non-GNU". https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland
  - Y_Y 3y ago
    > I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as non-GNU Linux, is in fact, Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux minus GNU.
abeyer 3y ago
I think I'd be a lot more excited about this if it didn't seem to be bought into the wayland hype train. I feel like they made a lot of good decisions in being simple enough without too simple, and backwards compatible enough without too much legacy... but imho wayland doesn't fit in that same space for me (at least not yet.)
- q66 3y ago
  good news for you then, since there is a full distribution of xorg in the contrib repo and it's not expected to go away anytime soon (if ever)
  - abeyer 3y ago
    Good to know. Their package search from the main site must not include contrib,though, as it only turns up wayland related packages, and nothing x11/xorg.
    - q66 3y ago
      there is a combobox to pick the repository: https://pkgs.chimera-linux.org/packages?name=xserver-xorg*&repo=contrib&origin= https://pkgs.chimera-linux.org/packages?name=xserver-xorg*&r...
- eternityforest 3y ago
  It seems like all the big name companies are 100% for Wayland, breaking compatibility with them seems like a hassle, regardless of how good Wayland itself is.
  - abeyer 3y ago
    > It seems like all the big name companies are 100% for Wayland nvidia? > breaking compatibility with them seems like a hassle They don't seem to be afraid of breaking compatibility -- witness deb/rpm, coreutils, glibc, etc...
LeFantome 3y ago
For everybody trying to figure out the point of Chimera Linux, it is Void Linux taken one step further. The founder used to be the maintainer of Void for PPC. That also explains the supported arch selection for Chimera. My take on Chimera is that it is what a FreeBSD user would want if they were going to use Linux. They share the same compiler and userland. The build system rings a lot of bells. At first, GNOME seems an odd choice but Chimera wants to avoid a lot of legacy and is pipewire and Wayland from the start.
- jchw 3y ago
  It looks quite nice though yeah, the choice of GNOME makes me a little bit less enthused. I wonder if System76's COSMIC will ever take off enough to be a consideration, as I would really like to see a new stable, pragmatic, productivity + user-focused DE take off. Plasma's a bit too buggy, GNOME feels not so pragmatic and definitely not so user-focused, the rest feel like they lack some level of polish and maintenance. System76 seems to have money to put into something good here, and they seem to have the right incentives to make something focused on user's needs and sensibilities more than developer's ideals, so it seems like in some time it could become a major contender.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Gnome is one of my favorite DE as to me it is so easily usable and efficient with maximise use of the keyboard straight out of the box while still being very practical to use with a tactile screen. I do understand that it may not be for everyone but my understanding is that when people say a desktop is not user focused, what they really mean is it isn't focused to people resistant to changes
    - berkes 3y ago
      > not user focused, what they really mean is it isn't focused to people resistant to changes That, or "it's not aligned perfectly with all my personal needs"
    - walteweiss 3y ago
krupan 3y ago
If you are along time GNU user (meaning GNU grep, sed, less, awk, find, tar, etc., etc.) this will be way more frustrating than you realize to use. Having lived in the UNIX days, I can still remember the subtle differences in all the command-line tools driving me nuts. This is actually how the GNU tools became popular even before Linux was a thing, you could install them on irix, hpux, sun, any UNIX, and you wouldn't have to deal with the quirky differences between hpux grep and irix grep (for example).
- Rediscover 3y ago
  tar(1) was the command that often bit back at me across the different Un*x implementations, vs awk(1) which for some unknown reason I had internalized the most miniscule differences. I got into the habit of immediately installing gtar on any Solaris box I had root on (damn the leading "/" in the archive). ----- The 2nd worst part was dealing with SunOS and HP/UX at work and Ultrix outside of work. Worst part was not grokking why MS-DOS wouldn't buffer keystrokes the few times I was exposed to it.
- lucideer 3y ago
  If the APIs of CLI utils is the primary concern, it's worth noting that they say their core userland is provided by "FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD" - so any friction here should in theory just be equivalent to the friction of using a BSD today (or Mac).
  - q66 3y ago
    it's solely FreeBSD as an upstream for us, though Net/Open are an upstream for FreeBSD itself for some tools the tools have made big strides over the last few decades, so it's nowhere near like it used to be back then
    - lucideer 3y ago
      Good to know. My quote above was taken from the website copy verbatim. Really cool looking project - looking forward to trying it out.
deleted 3y ago
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atlas_hugged 3y ago
[flagged]
- pjmlp 3y ago
  People that shit at GNU forget that without it, Linux would never ever taken off. It was the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit, giving uncertainty to BSD's future, combined with the maturity of GNU userspace that gave Linux the opportunity to be relevant at all. Nowadays it is the GNU religion. Personally I couldn't care less of what shape of UNIX I get to use, though I do acknowledge that GNU religion is what allowed me not to spend endless nights at the university compute center fighting for a DG/UX or Solaris terminal, instead we could work on assignments from the comfort of our homes.
  - atlas_hugged 3y ago
    Fundie Apología isn’t much better.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      macOS, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, PlayStation and WSL. Welcome to what a world without GNU looks like.
      - anthk 3y ago
        That "GNU" religion you call it has been able to speed up computing like no time else. Android have been enshitifying the last releases on encryption and privacy. Ironically Replicant 6 (libred Android 6.0) has more settings for that than the current Android 12. On Chrome OS, it's just a shell to Google services. Put these services down, no your device it's 75% useless. On PS, it's just a DRM -potentially-brickable-without-internet- console, and I 've had more fun overall with 8-16 bit games on a EEPROM based device (technically not a computing device, it's everything hardware, so it's fine), than the current DRM locked consoles with 'always-online' features making them useless too when your ISP goes down. At least with a ROM burned handheld I can play games anywhere and any time.
tomphoolery 3y ago
Interesting take on SystemD. I personally find it very helpful, but one of its major downsides as a project is that it is, to borrow a quote from Benno Rice, "aggressively Linux-specific". That said, it appears their own software choices prevent them from using it as summarized in the following quote: > That’s why one of the goals in Chimera is to implement the actual useful systemd functionality, but independently and in our own way, without the shortcomings. I question whether it would be possible for SystemD to be portable to other software stacks? Seems like it would be useful enough to attempt that port rather than literally rewrite SystemD, and you get to satisfy _both_ the SystemD stans and the haters at the same time! But who knows, it might lead to some kind of future innovation to have competing products doing the same thing...
- Santosh83 3y ago
  I think SystemD moves too fast, is too opinionated, and is too sprawling for those who're capable of porting it, to actually want to do that work, instead of writing a partial replacement, like this project does.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Nobody is going to use SystemD on Mac or Windows so why does it matter if it is Linux specific?
  - lproven 3y ago
    Linux is not the only FOSS Unix, you know.
pzmarzly 3y ago
If someone is also looking for more details on dinit, here is the repo: https://github.com/davmac314/dinit https://github.com/davmac314/dinit
- rahen 3y ago
  Thank you. Could you give summarize the main differences in approach between dinit and S6? I find S6 a stellar init system, so I'm interested.
  - pzmarzly 3y ago
    The author has a high-level overview doc here: https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISON https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISO... Now, of course, with service management the devil is in the details, so before you use something as system-wide init, I find it useful to ask yourself: How do they restart services? Do they give up at some point? How do they notify administrators of failures? Do they detect crashloops? How configurable is the logger? What CLIs are there to debug the state of the system (which service was first to fail, where is its definition)? How to make ephemeral or parametrised services? How to add pre-start, post-start, pre-stop, post-stop hooks? Can you use environment variables in your commands, and where do they come from? I don't think you can find answers to some of these questions in docs. Once you do learn the answers, they may be disappointing - I indeed found myself quite disappointed in systemd after having to debug many failed-to-boot machines. With s6, I never run it, but there are few choices that raise eyebrows, e.g. the restart delay is hardcoded in source code to be 1 second. With dinit, I have yet to finish reading all its manpages, but at least timeout and restart policies are configurable.
husam212 3y ago
Confusing name considering ChimeraOS which is also Linux based.
- NewJazz 3y ago
  Yeah, Chimera OS should have been more careful before choosing their name. https://github.com/ChimeraOS/chimeraos/issues/593 https://github.com/ChimeraOS/chimeraos/issues/593 I guess the Chimera OS maintainer was polite about it, and Chimera Linux was pretty under the radar for a while. The confusion is indeed unfortunate.
Hendrikto 3y ago
Even though I do not fully agree, I think this project has one of the most mature, nuanced, and balanced takes on systemd I have seen yet [0]. [0]: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take-on-systemd https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take...
- rahen 3y ago
  This is also the stand of Void Linux by the way. Void is not systemd-free for the sake of it but to offer a Linux system that keeps its Unix heritage of small, loosely coupled components, is reasonably POSIX and portable (xbps), and lets the user pick his libc.
  - LeFantome 3y ago
    The Chimera founder was a Void maintainer. There is certainly a fair bit of philosophical alignment. If Chimera is able to become as popular as Void is now, I would be happy. It would be amazing if it could be the next Arch. I am not sure what q66 wants for the distro but keeping the core distribution pure and having some successful derivatives would be cool ( if they kept to much the same vision ). But I guess I should let the project get out of Alpha first. :)
- treffer 3y ago
  This is a really neat one. I think the only part that should be more nuanced is > systemd is written to deliberately (ab)use every single non-portable extension under the sun I think this should be split into 2 parts. Linux specific kernel features and userspace extensions (GNU vs. POSIX). Using linux specific kernel features (like cgroups) is good for a linux system. E.g. a common issue with sshd used to be that under high load it would become slow and problematic to log in. Systemd configures the system such that this becomes less likely to happen. For userspace extensions I would have hoped that systemd would see it as a net positive to build upon a smaller set of tools and features, but the page seems to indicate otherwise. Does anyone know what happened on that front?
  - q66 3y ago
stunpix 3y ago
Not enough fragmentation! We need more! MORE!!!
- rahen 3y ago
  Linux is an anarchy, a hacker playground where anyone can pick the parts he likes the most and contribute new ones. If you want a monolithic, standardized, opinionated Unix, you may want to try macOS.
  - lproven 3y ago
    If you'd said FreeBSD, I'd have agreed with you.
deleted 3y ago
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christophilus 3y ago
Interesting that it’s a rolling release. I’m partial to those on my desktops, but I want stability on my servers. The other goals of the project seem to align well with what I want in a server distro. Anyway, I like the vision here, and am glad to see someone tackling things from this perspective.
schrodingerzhu 3y ago
As a side note, LLVM is developing its own libc. It is not usable for now. But it will finally grow into a fully functional one in a year or two.
Cheeeetah 3y ago
Seeing emacs for aarch64, I recall that Voidlinux still lacks non-x86 machines for prebuilt packages.
juliangmp 3y ago
A new linux distro that doesnt use systemd and is actually reasonable about it? Interesting... I think I'll keep an eye on this
LeFantome 3y ago
I am not sure that the founder approves of this but my current favourite way to use Chimera on the desktop is to install an Arch Linux distrobox inside it. This allows me to enjoy the base Chimera system while also having instant access to the full Arch repo and AUR catalog. It is also a simple way to run any application which currently has issues with MUSL ( since things run on Glibc inside distrobox ). Since Distrobox passes Wayland through, even graphical apps work great. The goal is to run as much as possible native in Chimera but sometimes I am just trying to get something else done. Chimera does not include distrobox in the repos but it does include podman so that gets you most of the way there. Anyway, it works great. I am posting this from Chimera right now. Some people prefer Flatpak but I prefer old school package management. Flatpak just feels so heavy and opaque to me ( but I know opinions differ ). Distrobox certainly works better for console stuff. Distrobox is just a handy tool as well and super convenient for spinning up quick sandboxes and temporary dev environments. Arch is just a personal choice as well. I could have picked Void or Debian or anything else.

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deleted 3y ago
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> Chimera is a general-purpose OS born from unhappiness with the state of Linux distributions. It's built around the core idea that a simple system does not have to require endless setup and customization to be practical. This seems disingenuous at best. Many distros already supply this feature. Debian is the most notable but there are many others. Install it, make any tweaks you want from the base install, sit on it for many years unchanged. Considering the next paragraph goes on to describe OpenBSD userland, LLVM compiler, and musl libc, it appears the aim is actually to build a Linux distribution without GNU. I usually steer away from projects which are defined by what they are not. It seems to build a community whose roots are based in hostility.

mig39 3y ago
> If that's the aim then just state that. At the top of the first page, under the Chimera Linux logo: "A modern, general-purpose non-GNU Linux distribution"
darkwater 3y ago
Came here to paste the same quote, just to highlight how disconnected from reality can be advertising "does not have to require endless setup" and then describe a rolling update distro, focused on power users and based on FreeBSD userland with a Linux kernel.
fmoralesc 3y ago
Not just not GNU: they also ditch systemd for dinit, syslog-ng and a bunch of homegrown plumbing: > We are also putting a lot of effort into writing fresh low-level plumbing. For example, Chimera comes with first-class and built-in support for user services and other things dependent on session tracking (such as a shared session bus), implemented from scratch thanks to our Turnstile project, finally bringing functionality previously only available on distributions using systemd. This is being implemented in a vendor-independent manner so that other distributions can adopt it.
- hedora 3y ago
  Good to know. That was my first question. I hope this means they also get rid of nonsense like pulseaudio and logind. I’m a bit skeptical of the “shared session bus” though. Linux supports inode watches for things that want to react to configuration changes, and session busses add a ton of complexity (including a second authorization language, and a userland SPOF)
  - NewJazz 3y ago
    They use pipewire IIRC (which is 1.0 now!!). And they have a custom alternative to login AIUI.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      They’re working on it. The reason is explained in the FAQ. For now they seem to be using a different alternative to do at least some of it. I think it was called elogind?
LeFantome 3y ago
“I usually steer away from projects which are defined by what they are not. It seems to build a community whose roots are based in hostility.” This is a somewhat ironic indictment of a project opting to avoid GNU. In fact, your quote could serve as a valid argument to avoid GNU. I cannot think of a project more completely defined by what it is not. I would certainly find it difficult to argue that GNU and its founder have not been a source of discord and hostility. The Open Source movement is a direct response to the hostile politics of GNU and Free Software. In the case of Chimera Linux though, the founder has been pretty clear that they made their choices for engineering reasons and not political ones. There are lots of GNU packages in Chimera if you want them.
- xcv123 3y ago
  GNU is defined as what it is; that it is an operating system and that it is free software. "What is GNU? GNU is an operating system that is free software—that is, it respects users' freedom." https://www.gnu.org https://www.gnu.org Although GNU stands for "GNU is NOT Unix" that doesn't count as its a boomer hacker meme that started before GNU.
  - akosoaaafjdr 3y ago
    I'll add that most anti-GNU people I know in the BSD space and related projects are not at all against GNU politically speaking or it's ideals or the free software movement. We mostly think that a variety of terrible technical decisions have been made and allowed to metastisize over the years, and that they are largely unfixable so long as Linux remains an operating system devoted primarily to ease of use, popularity, and packaged for non-professionals. A lot of this happened rather early on due to the influx of hobbyist programmers from the PC space, and so I think the GNU userland was mostly doomed from the beginning due to the qualifications (or lack thereof) of its programmers when important foundational design choices were made (they are better programmers and more professionally qualified these days, but they aren't about to roll back most of these foundational mistakes because it would collapse the whole thing like a tower of Jenga blocks). Those goals actually align a lot with the GNU philosophies and so I support the Linux community fully in that way and for making free software available to as many as possible. But technically speaking, GNU userland is a pile of dog shit, and you've really got to rip it out and start from scratch like Chimera is doing as a bare minimum to actually make any kind of progress there.
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0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
There is this bit (emphasis mine) >This means Chimera is not a GNU/Linux system, as it utilizes neither GNU utilities, nor GNU libc, nor GNU toolchain. However, *the project is not anti-GNU/GPL*, and its userland choice is primarily technical. Users are generally free to use whichever software they like. https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland This quote from the faq literally made me laugh out loud: >Another side of the coin is 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 as a project denounces such people, and is explicitly not a part of this community. Such people should also not view Chimera as some sort of haven, because it is not. The project is explicitly anti-elitist and aims to find constructive solutions. https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq Anyway, I wonder if they should be emphasizing security more on their homepage. >Being a single lightweight package, it makes hardening the userland a lot easier too. It is possible to compile the Chimera userland with CFI and other techniques very easily, and it applies to all of the tools. With GNU tools trying to using these tends to fail, and addressing the issues becomes harder because it is out of our control and involves a much chunkier codebase where more can go wrong and where things are harder to track down. https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq I would like to see more security-focused operating systems. And simplicity is obviously quite valuable for security. Perhaps they could find a nice niche as an accessible, UX and desktop-focused competitor to OpenBSD? Qubes is nice for desktop security, but it requires a powerful machine, and also maybe I could run Chimera in a qube some day for defense-in-depth :-) One advantage of a desktop focus is someday you could make money selling laptops with preinstalls. I'll bet a lot of people would buy a cheap security-focused laptop to manage critical accounts, infrastructure, private keys even. Especially big companies that care about security. Then roll your profits into creating a great bug bounty program for your OS, in a virtuous cycle.
q66 3y ago
i believe you are just making assumptions here; debian in this context does not count as a "simple system", if anything it's as complex as a distro can be and its packaging approach is a polar opposite of chimera's i still like debian either way, because it's a nice community with good values/principles that has provided and still provides great value to the ecosystem, but it can also often be very fragile the "just works" point of chimera stems from how things are built; everything it comes with is made to be "install and go" without having to go extra length to enable and set it up (while still being entirely transparent to the user), while being deterministic (packages in general don't rely on install hooks etc.) to ensure safe upgrades and easy auditing, and all that in a framework of a system that has a fraction of the complexity of a large distro and is maintainable by a small team we make it consistently clear that it's not a reactionary project (https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq, https://floss.social/@chimera_linux/111553324359284350 https://floss.social/@chimera_linux/111553324359284350, etc) and has no hostility to GNU or any of the projects we use alternatives to by default (and anybody displaying such hostility is unwelcome in the community)

eternityforest 3y ago

It's really cool, but I get worried anytime I see something that seems to want to be a user friendly, mainstream distro, after seeing how hard Manjaro tried with the whole "Bring simplicity to the masses" stuff and how many issues they still have. Is this an experimental or hobby distro or does it intend to be something grandma can use? If I had to choose this or BSD, it looks like I'd very strongly considering this or something like it, but it definitely doesn't seem like an Ubuntu or Windows replacement. Simplicity is just not a factor end users consider. As a dev who likes modern software and isn't really into lightweight hacker friendly stuff... the odds of me using anything that's not at least 1% or total desktop market share is pretty low. Anyone who's not an Arch/Kali/BSD/suckless enthusiast type has a finely tuned sense of "Oh no, that makes me feel the same way that thinking about a project car does, I'm outta here". It could drill be a wonderful worthwhile project... but it's going to be an uphill battle to interest anyone but tinkerers and I always kind of worry about people, because this stuff takes a lot of time and without managed expectations it can really be a disappointment when it doesn't take off. I've tried several times to start new projects and it's been pretty hard realizing they're unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon. I think getting any mainstream adoption would require changing the entire software ecosystem in general. I would imagine there would be some kind of issues trying to port current mega apps like Steam or Chrome to this. Plus, dynamic linking seems like it's not that well suited to user friendly distros meant for end users. Unless you have snap or Flatpak or something like that, I don't see how you can have cutting edge large complex third party packages without at least occasional compatibility issues. My experience with dynamic distros generally hasn't been terrible, but it always seems like there's some issue or other. Does this have any kind of AppArmor type sandboxing?

gjvc 3y ago
"""Anyone who's not an Arch/Kali/BSD/suckless enthusiast type has a finely tuned sense of "Oh no, that makes me feel the same way that thinking about a project car does, I'm outta here".""" excellent observation
- gjvc 3y ago
  think I should have said "excellent analogy" but hey-ho

alberth 3y ago

[flagged]

marcus0x62 3y ago
They've gone out of their way to use non-GNU tools and libraries.

dataangel 3y ago

So they're basically saying "our system will be better because more things will just work" but then they decided to use nonstandard libc and coreutils so actually getting existing Linux scripts and software to work in this distro will be harder.

deleted 3y ago
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torstenvl 3y ago
Saying musl is non-standard is a serious allegation. Can you expand on that? In what way does it violate the standard?
- wavemode 3y ago
  I read "nonstandard" in their comment by its dictionary definition ("not average, normal, or usual"). Not that it literally violates a published standard.
  - NewJazz 3y ago
    Most Linux installs are going to be using Bionic libc, so still dubious to call glibc "standard". This is Linux. There is no standard. OpenWRT used uClibc until 2019.
    - xcv123 3y ago
      GNU/Linux is the standard, as in most common. That's where it all started. Android is not used as a desktop or server OS.
      - Conscat 3y ago
        Android is used as a desktop OS in a limited capacity among a small group of hackers.

5- 3y ago

i really like a lot of design choices in chimera linux (particularly around its packaging/build system), but as a current alpine linux (main pc, not docker) user, i find i still can't justify musl. i like small simple correct software, but musl, despite being all of those things, is, in my experience - slower than glibc, and in occasionally difficult to predict spots; - causes just a bit too much trouble porting software to it -- most upstreams are reluctant to accept patches, resulting in maintenance overhead for the distribution; - occasionally subtly breaks things at runtime -- e.g. both alpine and chimera builds of firefox have the same two crashes which neither the official mozilla nor archlinux builds exhibit. in the end i find i have to rely on my glibc chroot (e.g. for mozilla firefox build) too much for my liking.

freedomben 3y ago
This has been my experience with alpine as well. musl just ends up causing much more trouble than it is worth
- sidkshatriya 3y ago
  For the longest time using anything but gcc was a problem. But people found clang/llvm better in many respects and persisted. Today clang/llvm is a drop in option, even to compile the Linux kernel. Similarly we should persist with musl. It’s infinitely cleaner, simpler and understandable.
  - musicale 3y ago
    As you imply, it's not really a standard unless there are multiple implementations. I am in favor of standardizing the behavior of libc and having multiple implementations that are commonly used.
    - LeFantome 3y ago
      There are many, many implementations of the C standard library. Every OS has one—even Windows. There are also many other POSIX ( UNIX-like ) operating systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD which have their own. Redox has a Rust-based C library called Relibc that even works on Linux. There are also other C libraries that work on Linux such as dietLibc and of course Bionic, which is the standard C library on Android. The problem is not the lack of a standard, it is that Glibc does not follow the standard and is itself the de facto choice for desktop Linux. Applications that assume Glibc may not work on other implementations ( like MUSL ).

devit 3y ago

"that a simple system does not have to require endless setup and customization to be practical" and "alternative userland" don't go together since obviously any "alternative userland" is going to break lots of stuff and thus require extensive tweaking work.

q66 3y ago
they do though, just not in the way you think; in general chimera is designed so that whatever you install from the repositories, it'll yield a working out of the box configuration you want a desktop? you install it and it works; there is no (mandatory) tinkering with getting dbus, audio, wifi/bluetooth, or whatever else to work - most importantly things are set up in a way that installs are consistently deterministic and auditable (there is no reliance on complicated shell hooks or anything of the sort to do any kind of "fixups", most packages consist solely of extraction) sure, when you involve third party shell scripts or whatever, there is a chance you'll run into compatibility troubles, but perhaps not as often as you think either
- eternityforest 3y ago
  I'm not a "hacker distro guy", so my opinion doesn't matter much, but thisn definitely seems far more interesting than the piles of shell scripts most distros use.
nine_k 3y ago
If it's alternative but largely compatible, I don't see a lot of tweaking ahead. If it's materially different, it's mostly going to be learning, before any tweaking.

Levitating 3y ago

> Chimera is a general-purpose OS born from unhappiness with the state of Linux distributions. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ It seems to have a nice build system. But I am not sure this solves any issue any other distribution has. And with the amount of opinionated choices this distribution has I imagine there are few who it fits. I think for many, Void would be a better choice. They do defend/document their choices well. Though I don't know why they'd support that many architectures, I think they might regret that. Anyway I wish this team the best of luck. Who knows, maybe some of their homegrown projects might see use elsewhere.

natrys 3y ago
Chimera creator is a former Void dev iirc, maintained the PowerPC arch among other things.
q66 3y ago
chimera is designed to solve many issues other distros have; this includes e.g. the poor state of toolchain security hardening (you won't find any other distro with the same practical scope that's more strongly hardened in builds) cbuild is also designed to solve real issues, particularly proper sandboxing and linting of builds to allow for a small team to maintain it while at the same time being fast and ensuring correctness (distro build systems often tend to be bash/make monstrosities that do nowhere near enough where they need to while doing too much where they shouldn't) i used to work on void, and there are good reasons i went to start a new project instead; this includes poor quality packaging for a lot of void stuff (by part caused by xbps-src design choices), poor platform support (all non-x86 stuff is buggy, partly because of cross-compiling and not running unit tests for things being built) and state of infrastructure, design issues of xbps itself (lack of solver, poor implementation of shlibs system and virtual packages, etc.), lacking service management (no oneshots, no transparent/standardized support for user services, no support for dependencies, no support for service-integrated dbus activation etc.), lots of stuff sticks with legacy nonsense where systemd has taken over and improved things in the meantime (e.g. handling of dbus, user management and tmpfiles management, user services as mentioned before, etc), and so on and so on we are also addressing the whole thing with "everybody has adopted systemd and its functionality, and distros without systemd have instead stuck their head in the sand and pretend systemd is the devil and implement none of the stuff people want" which is leading to increased dependence on systemd in various upstreams, and an increasing amount of bad hacks in non-systemd systems supporting a lot of architectures is not something to regret, it's a good goal to have and aids keeping the ecosystem healthy as well as giving people the choice of running the system on hardware they like; any pain caused by supporting multiple archs pays off several times

qweqwe14 3y ago

Chimera was developed by the same person that ported Void Linux to PowerPC https://web.archive.org/web/20230811081600/https://voidlinux-ppc.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230811081600/https://voidlinux... https://voidlinux.org https://voidlinux.org

Loxicon 3y ago

what is non-GNU?

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
See [1]. Essentially the programs which most Linux distributions come with are provided by the GNU project, especially basic infrastructure stuff. Stuff like sed, less, awk, etc. However these programs have cousins in stuff like BSD or Busybox, which implement similar functionality, but have a mostly, or completely separate codebase, and some differences in what they can do and how you make them do it, with a common user-facing one being differences in the command line flags available, and precisely how they behave. In this case, Chimera uses a mix of stuff from FreeBSD and elsewhere, and also uses an alternative toolchain for compiling C, called musl, which is not glibc (glibc being a GNU project). Since Linux distributions that use GNU are almost the universal rule, distros like this describe themsekves as "non-GNU". https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland
- Y_Y 3y ago
  > I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as non-GNU Linux, is in fact, Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux minus GNU.

abeyer 3y ago

I think I'd be a lot more excited about this if it didn't seem to be bought into the wayland hype train. I feel like they made a lot of good decisions in being simple enough without too simple, and backwards compatible enough without too much legacy... but imho wayland doesn't fit in that same space for me (at least not yet.)

q66 3y ago
good news for you then, since there is a full distribution of xorg in the contrib repo and it's not expected to go away anytime soon (if ever)
- abeyer 3y ago
  Good to know. Their package search from the main site must not include contrib,though, as it only turns up wayland related packages, and nothing x11/xorg.
  - q66 3y ago
    there is a combobox to pick the repository: https://pkgs.chimera-linux.org/packages?name=xserver-xorg*&repo=contrib&origin= https://pkgs.chimera-linux.org/packages?name=xserver-xorg*&r...
eternityforest 3y ago
It seems like all the big name companies are 100% for Wayland, breaking compatibility with them seems like a hassle, regardless of how good Wayland itself is.
- abeyer 3y ago
  > It seems like all the big name companies are 100% for Wayland nvidia? > breaking compatibility with them seems like a hassle They don't seem to be afraid of breaking compatibility -- witness deb/rpm, coreutils, glibc, etc...

LeFantome 3y ago

For everybody trying to figure out the point of Chimera Linux, it is Void Linux taken one step further. The founder used to be the maintainer of Void for PPC. That also explains the supported arch selection for Chimera. My take on Chimera is that it is what a FreeBSD user would want if they were going to use Linux. They share the same compiler and userland. The build system rings a lot of bells. At first, GNOME seems an odd choice but Chimera wants to avoid a lot of legacy and is pipewire and Wayland from the start.

jchw 3y ago
It looks quite nice though yeah, the choice of GNOME makes me a little bit less enthused. I wonder if System76's COSMIC will ever take off enough to be a consideration, as I would really like to see a new stable, pragmatic, productivity + user-focused DE take off. Plasma's a bit too buggy, GNOME feels not so pragmatic and definitely not so user-focused, the rest feel like they lack some level of polish and maintenance. System76 seems to have money to put into something good here, and they seem to have the right incentives to make something focused on user's needs and sensibilities more than developer's ideals, so it seems like in some time it could become a major contender.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Gnome is one of my favorite DE as to me it is so easily usable and efficient with maximise use of the keyboard straight out of the box while still being very practical to use with a tactile screen. I do understand that it may not be for everyone but my understanding is that when people say a desktop is not user focused, what they really mean is it isn't focused to people resistant to changes
  - berkes 3y ago
    > not user focused, what they really mean is it isn't focused to people resistant to changes That, or "it's not aligned perfectly with all my personal needs"
  - walteweiss 3y ago

krupan 3y ago

If you are along time GNU user (meaning GNU grep, sed, less, awk, find, tar, etc., etc.) this will be way more frustrating than you realize to use. Having lived in the UNIX days, I can still remember the subtle differences in all the command-line tools driving me nuts. This is actually how the GNU tools became popular even before Linux was a thing, you could install them on irix, hpux, sun, any UNIX, and you wouldn't have to deal with the quirky differences between hpux grep and irix grep (for example).

Rediscover 3y ago
tar(1) was the command that often bit back at me across the different Un*x implementations, vs awk(1) which for some unknown reason I had internalized the most miniscule differences. I got into the habit of immediately installing gtar on any Solaris box I had root on (damn the leading "/" in the archive). ----- The 2nd worst part was dealing with SunOS and HP/UX at work and Ultrix outside of work. Worst part was not grokking why MS-DOS wouldn't buffer keystrokes the few times I was exposed to it.
lucideer 3y ago
If the APIs of CLI utils is the primary concern, it's worth noting that they say their core userland is provided by "FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD" - so any friction here should in theory just be equivalent to the friction of using a BSD today (or Mac).
- q66 3y ago
  it's solely FreeBSD as an upstream for us, though Net/Open are an upstream for FreeBSD itself for some tools the tools have made big strides over the last few decades, so it's nowhere near like it used to be back then
  - lucideer 3y ago
    Good to know. My quote above was taken from the website copy verbatim. Really cool looking project - looking forward to trying it out.

deleted 3y ago

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atlas_hugged 3y ago

[flagged]

pjmlp 3y ago
People that shit at GNU forget that without it, Linux would never ever taken off. It was the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit, giving uncertainty to BSD's future, combined with the maturity of GNU userspace that gave Linux the opportunity to be relevant at all. Nowadays it is the GNU religion. Personally I couldn't care less of what shape of UNIX I get to use, though I do acknowledge that GNU religion is what allowed me not to spend endless nights at the university compute center fighting for a DG/UX or Solaris terminal, instead we could work on assignments from the comfort of our homes.
- atlas_hugged 3y ago
  Fundie Apología isn’t much better.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    macOS, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, PlayStation and WSL. Welcome to what a world without GNU looks like.
    - anthk 3y ago
      That "GNU" religion you call it has been able to speed up computing like no time else. Android have been enshitifying the last releases on encryption and privacy. Ironically Replicant 6 (libred Android 6.0) has more settings for that than the current Android 12. On Chrome OS, it's just a shell to Google services. Put these services down, no your device it's 75% useless. On PS, it's just a DRM -potentially-brickable-without-internet- console, and I 've had more fun overall with 8-16 bit games on a EEPROM based device (technically not a computing device, it's everything hardware, so it's fine), than the current DRM locked consoles with 'always-online' features making them useless too when your ISP goes down. At least with a ROM burned handheld I can play games anywhere and any time.

tomphoolery 3y ago

Interesting take on SystemD. I personally find it very helpful, but one of its major downsides as a project is that it is, to borrow a quote from Benno Rice, "aggressively Linux-specific". That said, it appears their own software choices prevent them from using it as summarized in the following quote: > That’s why one of the goals in Chimera is to implement the actual useful systemd functionality, but independently and in our own way, without the shortcomings. I question whether it would be possible for SystemD to be portable to other software stacks? Seems like it would be useful enough to attempt that port rather than literally rewrite SystemD, and you get to satisfy _both_ the SystemD stans and the haters at the same time! But who knows, it might lead to some kind of future innovation to have competing products doing the same thing...

Santosh83 3y ago
I think SystemD moves too fast, is too opinionated, and is too sprawling for those who're capable of porting it, to actually want to do that work, instead of writing a partial replacement, like this project does.
IshKebab 3y ago
Nobody is going to use SystemD on Mac or Windows so why does it matter if it is Linux specific?
- lproven 3y ago
  Linux is not the only FOSS Unix, you know.

pzmarzly 3y ago

If someone is also looking for more details on dinit, here is the repo: https://github.com/davmac314/dinit https://github.com/davmac314/dinit

rahen 3y ago
Thank you. Could you give summarize the main differences in approach between dinit and S6? I find S6 a stellar init system, so I'm interested.
- pzmarzly 3y ago
  The author has a high-level overview doc here: https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISON https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISO... Now, of course, with service management the devil is in the details, so before you use something as system-wide init, I find it useful to ask yourself: How do they restart services? Do they give up at some point? How do they notify administrators of failures? Do they detect crashloops? How configurable is the logger? What CLIs are there to debug the state of the system (which service was first to fail, where is its definition)? How to make ephemeral or parametrised services? How to add pre-start, post-start, pre-stop, post-stop hooks? Can you use environment variables in your commands, and where do they come from? I don't think you can find answers to some of these questions in docs. Once you do learn the answers, they may be disappointing - I indeed found myself quite disappointed in systemd after having to debug many failed-to-boot machines. With s6, I never run it, but there are few choices that raise eyebrows, e.g. the restart delay is hardcoded in source code to be 1 second. With dinit, I have yet to finish reading all its manpages, but at least timeout and restart policies are configurable.

husam212 3y ago

Confusing name considering ChimeraOS which is also Linux based.

NewJazz 3y ago
Yeah, Chimera OS should have been more careful before choosing their name. https://github.com/ChimeraOS/chimeraos/issues/593 https://github.com/ChimeraOS/chimeraos/issues/593 I guess the Chimera OS maintainer was polite about it, and Chimera Linux was pretty under the radar for a while. The confusion is indeed unfortunate.

Hendrikto 3y ago

Even though I do not fully agree, I think this project has one of the most mature, nuanced, and balanced takes on systemd I have seen yet [0]. [0]: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take-on-systemd https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take...

rahen 3y ago
This is also the stand of Void Linux by the way. Void is not systemd-free for the sake of it but to offer a Linux system that keeps its Unix heritage of small, loosely coupled components, is reasonably POSIX and portable (xbps), and lets the user pick his libc.
- LeFantome 3y ago
  The Chimera founder was a Void maintainer. There is certainly a fair bit of philosophical alignment. If Chimera is able to become as popular as Void is now, I would be happy. It would be amazing if it could be the next Arch. I am not sure what q66 wants for the distro but keeping the core distribution pure and having some successful derivatives would be cool ( if they kept to much the same vision ). But I guess I should let the project get out of Alpha first. :)
treffer 3y ago
This is a really neat one. I think the only part that should be more nuanced is > systemd is written to deliberately (ab)use every single non-portable extension under the sun I think this should be split into 2 parts. Linux specific kernel features and userspace extensions (GNU vs. POSIX). Using linux specific kernel features (like cgroups) is good for a linux system. E.g. a common issue with sshd used to be that under high load it would become slow and problematic to log in. Systemd configures the system such that this becomes less likely to happen. For userspace extensions I would have hoped that systemd would see it as a net positive to build upon a smaller set of tools and features, but the page seems to indicate otherwise. Does anyone know what happened on that front?
- q66 3y ago

stunpix 3y ago

Not enough fragmentation! We need more! MORE!!!

rahen 3y ago
Linux is an anarchy, a hacker playground where anyone can pick the parts he likes the most and contribute new ones. If you want a monolithic, standardized, opinionated Unix, you may want to try macOS.
- lproven 3y ago
  If you'd said FreeBSD, I'd have agreed with you.

deleted 3y ago

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christophilus 3y ago

Interesting that it’s a rolling release. I’m partial to those on my desktops, but I want stability on my servers. The other goals of the project seem to align well with what I want in a server distro. Anyway, I like the vision here, and am glad to see someone tackling things from this perspective.

schrodingerzhu 3y ago

As a side note, LLVM is developing its own libc. It is not usable for now. But it will finally grow into a fully functional one in a year or two.

Cheeeetah 3y ago

Seeing emacs for aarch64, I recall that Voidlinux still lacks non-x86 machines for prebuilt packages.

juliangmp 3y ago

A new linux distro that doesnt use systemd and is actually reasonable about it? Interesting... I think I'll keep an eye on this

LeFantome 3y ago

I am not sure that the founder approves of this but my current favourite way to use Chimera on the desktop is to install an Arch Linux distrobox inside it. This allows me to enjoy the base Chimera system while also having instant access to the full Arch repo and AUR catalog. It is also a simple way to run any application which currently has issues with MUSL ( since things run on Glibc inside distrobox ). Since Distrobox passes Wayland through, even graphical apps work great. The goal is to run as much as possible native in Chimera but sometimes I am just trying to get something else done. Chimera does not include distrobox in the repos but it does include podman so that gets you most of the way there. Anyway, it works great. I am posting this from Chimera right now. Some people prefer Flatpak but I prefer old school package management. Flatpak just feels so heavy and opaque to me ( but I know opinions differ ). Distrobox certainly works better for console stuff. Distrobox is just a handy tool as well and super convenient for spinning up quick sandboxes and temporary dev environments. Arch is just a personal choice as well. I could have picked Void or Debian or anything else.