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 (feed)

January 22, 2024

2024 image refresh

The images have been refreshed yet again.

Most importantly these bring the 6.6 LTS kernel, an upgrade from the 6.1 series (except Raspberry Pi images, which have their own kernel) alongside minor user experience improvements.

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December 27, 2023

New images again

A new set of images has been released once again.

This is once again a refresh without any major functionality changes outside of new software; but it does bring important changes to apk-tools as well as out of the box support for Raspberry Pi 5. It comes with GNOME 45 and kernel 6.1.

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