Chimera Linux
Chimera Linux
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.
60 comments
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I was confused.
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What's wrong with GNU?
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It's not about GNU being wrong or not, it's about having the choice.
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Yeah, you have the choice of have your software be controlled by companies that could just stop licensing it.
But 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.
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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?
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Yeah it's definitely young and not for everyone. But you gotta start somewhere ! I do agree that the "shortcomings" are not explicitly defined, but rather implied in the FAQ.
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Alpine is also GNU-free afaik.
EDIT: Except for the GCC toolchain.
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It's a lot of things-free, to be fair
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That's kind of the point though, as it's now used as a base for many containers ;)
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Its still amazing how easy it is to use, you can get a desktop environment running in a couple of minutes and apk is insanely fast and easy
Would have probably tried as my main PC distro if NVIDIA drivers would work on it :(
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Chimera Linux actually uses apk or Alpine Package Keeper as its package manager, they acknowledge this but despite that market themselves as if they did something revolutionary that has never been done before
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had the same thought, not sure if Alpine is built with LLVM though.
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Yup. It uses GCC toolchain afaik.
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That's right ! It uses BusyBox as its userland which was my main problem with it (though you can easily install GNU coreutils).
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Alpine is still GCC based in the very least.
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Indeed it seems so.
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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.
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I already used alpine for a few years, before containers were a thing. I heard about it exactly because it was advertised as a distro without GNU components, which was revolutionary at the time.
You sound weary with that kind of comment, I wonder what bother you so much about seeing a new distro pop up ?
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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.
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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.
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I can only imagine that this project is not an easy one! Wishing you the best with it.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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Sure, go ahead, use licenses that let Apple steal everything later.
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Not using GNU software doesn't mean you don't use any copyleft licenses or GPL.
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It is good to have a diversity of software. That doesn't make it stupid. Most of the alternatives to GNU programs are GPL licensed anyway.
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This is patently false. Most alternatives to GNU software are permissively licensed (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc.). Just look at musl, clang, bzip2, and the various “new” userland replacements like ripgrep, neovim, bat, exa, dust, etc. The one notable exception is busybox which is GPL 2.
I don’t know why this trend exists, but I am constantly disappointed that talented young open source devs choose to sacrifice software freedom just because it will make their software easier to integrate in proprietary contexts. This strikes me as pure vanity or greed on the devs part so that their software is more popular and maybe even monetizable.
I hope that trend halts, but time will tell.
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Arguing over licences to judge how much a piece of software is worth is sterile IMO.
If you personally cannot use software that's not GPL'd, then it's fine. But there's no need to sound condescending like this, it brings absolutely nothing to the table. This could only result in a flame war (and it already is unfortunately, seeing the comments below), which is kind of sad.
So yeah, no prob mate, this is not for you, we get it. See you on the next thread 🫡
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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.
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I heard about this a little while back. I think it's interesting, and it's nice to see someone try something slightly different. The creator is obviously opinionated about how their distro should work. At least it's not just another debian/ubuntu based distro.
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I could waste a lot of time on this :)
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This is nice. Shame it won't support systemd.
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Turning this a little around by saying: systemd doesn't support musl.
I remember reading somewhere that systemd specifically uses some gnu extensions of glibc, and thus cannot be built against any other libc implementation (at the moment).
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60 comments