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.
Read more for details.
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.
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.
UPDATE March 20 2025: The architecture is not being dropped for now after all. See the newer article for details.
The next set of images will drop RISC-V support. The builder is currently still going but within the next few days it will stop, and the repositories will stay in place but frozen.
Nothing will change in packaging (the build profile will remain, template support where present will remain, cross-toolchains will remain) but there will be no more updates to the repo for the foreseeable future.