A modern, general-purpose Linux distribution
Chimera is a general-purpose Linux-based OS born from unhappiness with the status quo. We aim to create a system that is simple, transparent, and easy to pick up, without having to give up practicality and a rich feature set.
It is built from scratch using novel tooling, approaches, and userland. Instead of intentionally limiting ourselves, we strive to achieve both conceptual simplicity and convenience with careful and high quality software design.
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Chimera uses a novel combination of core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library, delivering a fresh experience with several major benefits.
Chimera aims to eliminate legacy cruft where possible to deliver a modern, general purpose, fully featured operating system that is simple but complete.
Chimera is a binary distribution, but a source package build system is provided, enabling easy packaging of new software, builds of custom packages, and accessible infrastructure.
You can use Chimera on all kinds of processors, including Intel/AMD, ARM AArch64, POWER and RISC-V. Central build system ensures packages are available everywhere.
The 20250420 set of images is now published.
This is an incremental refresh with some major changes.
As circumstances have changed, we are not dropping RISC-V repos for the time being. Instead, newly rebuilt repositories are introduced, built on hardware, with tests.
This support is provisional for now, with the new builder still being evaluated to see how it holds up in the long term.