Chimera Linux Enters Beta Phase

Chimera Linux founder q66:

At the point of entering alpha, the cports tree had roughly 1000 templates, most of them in main. There was a single large desktop (GNOME) and a single major web browser (Firefox) and an assortment of other software.

At this point, the tree contains ~2800 templates, i.e. almost 3x more. We have all major desktop environments, all major browsers, and overall much larger collection of both small and large programs.

The repo was also at ~6000 commits at the time, by 11 authors; now it’s almost 20000 commits, by over 100 authors.

Significant under-the-hood improvements have been made in service management, our build infrastructure, the cbuild build system which is now significantly more powerful and has much better UX, global switch to the mimalloc allocator, stateless /var and progress towards stateless /etc, improvements in core userland, introduction of libdinitctl, introduction of sd-tools, and a lot more.

My favourite up and coming Linux distro continues to mature. I’ve been running it since the alpha release in June 2023. I’m now running it on three servers (the ones powering this website), as well as in WSL on my laptop (where I’m writing this post), and dual booting my desktop.

If you haven’t encountered Chimera Linux before, the project aims to build a Linux distribution that sheds some legacy baggage, and is smaller and easier to understand. To achieve this it combines the Linux kernel, LLVM toolchain, musl libc, FreeBSD userland, dinit init, apk package manager, and home grown cports package build tooling. There’s more details on the about page.