A modern, general-purpose non-GNU Linux distribution

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.

It aims to capture the convenience of complex distributions while retaining conceptual simplicity. To this purpose, it is built from scratch using novel tooling and approaches.

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Alternative userland.

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.

Clean and consistent.

Chimera aims to eliminate legacy cruft where possible to deliver a modern, general purpose, fully featured operating system that is simple but complete.

Buildable from source.

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.

Portable.

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.

Recent news

September 15, 2023

New images

A new set of images has been released once again.

This is mostly a refresh. The previous images still work fine for installation. These new images bring updated software, and a few other functional changes.

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June 11, 2023

Entering alpha stage

Today marks the day when the project enters the alpha phase. This has some implications, though it is not a release per se, considering Chimera is a rolling distribution; let’s take a look at what it means for potential users and contributors.

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