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Chimera Linux

chimera-linux.org

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Re: Chimera Linux

#61

Post by q66 »

eternityforest wrote: post #7

It's really cool, but I get worried anytime I see something that seems to want to be a user friendly, mainstream distro, after seeing how hard Manjaro tried with the whole "Bring simplicity to the masses" stuff and how many issues they still have. Is this an experimental or hobby distro or does it intend to be something grandma can use? If I had to choose this or BSD, it looks like I'd very strongly considering this…

the system does not aim to bring anything "to the masses" right now, considering the stage it's in; likely won't in the future either, as it's aimed at power users primarily

you can run steam in flatpak (it's there), chromium will probably come natively in not that long, it does not seem like that big of a nightmare besides the ways chromium is a nightmare in in general (you can run it in flatpak too right now)

there is no apparmor right now, but it'll come

Re: Chimera Linux

#62

Post by q66 »

creatonez wrote: post #51
eternityforest wrote: post #7

It's really cool, but I get worried anytime I see something that seems to want to be a user friendly, mainstream distro, after seeing how hard Manjaro tried with the whole "Bring simplicity to the masses" stuff and how many issues they still have. Is this an experimental or hobby distro or does it intend to be something grandma can use? If I had to choose this or BSD, it looks like I'd very strongly considering this…

The website doesn't really give the impression that it intends to be a mainstream OS. Marketing seems to be "lightweight hacker distro using musl, but simpler than the others in the same category". I wish Linux distributions could advertise to existing Linux users without inadvertently causing this sort of confusion among the non-Linux tech media. Many Linux users don't want the OS to take off, because things will ge…

it's designed to be a hacker distro; i just felt like "hacker distros" frequently tend to make a lot of things overly manual for no reason primarily due to halfassed choices made when packaging things - the way things are built in chimera is so that whatever is in the repo is "install and go" - and this includes things like large complicated desktops, in general things are designed so that if you bootstrap a system from scratch (by installing all the packages in an empty root) you need to do nothing more - other than the stuff you wish to explicitly change, and this is done without involving complicated scripts or anything of the likes, vast majority of packages install by simply unpacking themselves

to a degree your system package graph also defines your system configuration for things that are coarse enough to allow it; it's also easily auditable

Re: Chimera Linux

#63

Post by sidkshatriya »

freedomben wrote: post #17
5- wrote: post #10

i really like a lot of design choices in chimera linux (particularly around its packaging/build system), but as a current alpine linux (main pc, not docker) user, i find i still can't justify musl. i like small simple correct software, but musl, despite being all of those things, is, in my experience - slower than glibc, and in occasionally difficult to predict spots; - causes just a bit too much trouble porting soft…

This has been my experience with alpine as well. musl just ends up causing much more trouble than it is worth

For the longest time using anything but gcc was a problem. But people found clang/llvm better in many respects and persisted. Today clang/llvm is a drop in option, even to compile the Linux kernel.

Similarly we should persist with musl. It’s infinitely cleaner, simpler and understandable.

Re: Chimera Linux

#64

Post by q66 »

akosoaaafjdr wrote: post #28
eternityforest wrote: post #7

It's really cool, but I get worried anytime I see something that seems to want to be a user friendly, mainstream distro, after seeing how hard Manjaro tried with the whole "Bring simplicity to the masses" stuff and how many issues they still have. Is this an experimental or hobby distro or does it intend to be something grandma can use? If I had to choose this or BSD, it looks like I'd very strongly considering this…

I mean yeah, this is transparently a BSD esque project it looks like, as in its pretty clearly tailored specifically to provide the kinds of features professional systems programmers and admins have been clamoring for from Linux for a very long time. Chimera is basically exactly what FreeBSD is but with a Linux kernel (for instance, clang/LLVM as the system compiler and lack of glibc as system libc), I'd imagine ther…

chimera is not much like freebsd at all, besides adopting the same core tools; it's mostly designed from scratch, and does not particularly try to "emulate" anything

i do like freebsd, i used it for around a decade so it probably left some mark (just like other systems i have touched over the years, like void and debian), but chimera does not try to explicitly be like anything else - i simply do what i feel are fitting design choices

Re: Chimera Linux

#65

Post by sidkshatriya »

NewJazz wrote: post #18
5- wrote: post #10

i really like a lot of design choices in chimera linux (particularly around its packaging/build system), but as a current alpine linux (main pc, not docker) user, i find i still can't justify musl. i like small simple correct software, but musl, despite being all of those things, is, in my experience - slower than glibc, and in occasionally difficult to predict spots; - causes just a bit too much trouble porting soft…

[musl is] slower than glibc, and in occasionally difficult to predict spots Note that sometimes (/often) this purely due to the allocator, and as far as I remember Chimera uses a different allocator than the stock musl one.

Happy chimera user here. It feels fast in regular usage though I use ssh much more than desktop.

What’s actually amazing about chimera is the musl + clang/llvm/compiler-rt combination. It allows you to do all kinds of amazing things easily from a programming perspective.

The apk 3 package manager, build system (cbuild) is also excellent. Everything feels modern and clean. Package availability is still limited and you would probably need to compile many of your favourite packages from source but I would still highly recommend this distribution.

Re: Chimera Linux

#66

Post by q66 »

devit wrote: post #37

"that a simple system does not have to require endless setup and customization to be practical" and "alternative userland" don't go together since obviously any "alternative userland" is going to break lots of stuff and thus require extensive tweaking work.

they do though, just not in the way you think; in general chimera is designed so that whatever you install from the repositories, it'll yield a working out of the box configuration

you want a desktop? you install it and it works; there is no (mandatory) tinkering with getting dbus, audio, wifi/bluetooth, or whatever else to work - most importantly things are set up in a way that installs are consistently deterministic and auditable (there is no reliance on complicated shell hooks or anything of the sort to do any kind of "fixups", most packages consist solely of extraction)

sure, when you involve third party shell scripts or whatever, there is a chance you'll run into compatibility troubles, but perhaps not as often as you think either

Re: Chimera Linux

#68

Post by q66 »

dataangel wrote: post #9

So they're basically saying "our system will be better because more things will just work" but then they decided to use nonstandard libc and coreutils so actually getting existing Linux scripts and software to work in this distro will be harder .

the point with "just working" applies to what the system ships, obviously third party whatever is outside of our control

the system aims to have high quality packaging that results in a system that is consistently deterministic and auditable, while indeed making things just work (no extra effort beyond just installation required to get any software the system ships to work - on any CPU architecture it supports) - you can bootstrap a fully working system pretty much just by installing a single metapackage + a kernel in a root (and then refreshing the bootloader)

Re: Chimera Linux

#69

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

Loxicon wrote: post #67

what is non-GNU?

See [1]. Essentially the programs which most Linux distributions come with are provided by the GNU project, especially basic infrastructure stuff. Stuff like sed, less, awk, etc.

However these programs have cousins in stuff like BSD or Busybox, which implement similar functionality, but have a mostly, or completely separate codebase, and some differences in what they can do and how you make them do it, with a common user-facing one being differences in the command line flags available, and precisely how they behave.

In this case, Chimera uses a mix of stuff from FreeBSD and elsewhere, and also uses an alternative toolchain for compiling C, called musl, which is not glibc (glibc being a GNU project).

Since Linux distributions that use GNU are almost the universal rule, distros like this describe themsekves as "non-GNU".

https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland

Re: Chimera Linux

#70

Post by q66 »

suprjami wrote: post #3

> 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. This seems disingenuous at best. Many distros already supply this feature. Debian is the most notable but there are many others. Install it, make any tweaks you want from the base install, sit on it…

i believe you are just making assumptions here; debian in this context does not count as a "simple system", if anything it's as complex as a distro can be and its packaging approach is a polar opposite of chimera's

i still like debian either way, because it's a nice community with good values/principles that has provided and still provides great value to the ecosystem, but it can also often be very fragile

the "just works" point of chimera stems from how things are built; everything it comes with is made to be "install and go" without having to go extra length to enable and set it up (while still being entirely transparent to the user), while being deterministic (packages in general don't rely on install hooks etc.) to ensure safe upgrades and easy auditing, and all that in a framework of a system that has a fraction of the complexity of a large distro and is maintainable by a small team

we make it consistently clear that it's not a reactionary project (https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq, https://floss.social/@chimera_linux/111553324359284350, etc) and has no hostility to GNU or any of the projects we use alternatives to by default (and anybody displaying such hostility is unwelcome in the community)

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