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Chimera Linux

chimera-linux.org

121–130 of 224 posts

Re: Chimera Linux

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you imply, it's not really a standard unless there are multiple implementations. I am in favor of standardizing the behavior of libc and having multiple implementations that are commonly used.

There are many, many implementations of the C standard library. Every OS has one—even Windows. There are also many other POSIX ( UNIX-like ) operating systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD which have their own. Redox has a Rust-based C library called Relibc that even works on Linux. There are also other C libraries that work on Linux such as dietLibc and of course Bionic, which is the standard C library on Android. The…

> The problem is not the lack of a standard, it is that Glibc does not follow the standard and is itself the de facto choice for desktop Linux. Applications that assume Glibc may not work on other implementations ( like MUSL ).

That's incorrect Glibc does follow the relevant standards, you can simply restrict yourself to only use POSIX and C11, it's just that program authors find the glibc-extensions convenient enough to use them over just the bare standard.

That said, some of the other libraries don't even claim to support the relevant standards, e.g. Bionic is not even fully POSIX compliant. So an application that assumes MUSL (which btw, also implements glibc, BSD and Linux extensions), can't use Bionic as a drop in replacement (not sure about Relibc).

Re: Chimera Linux

#122
post #118
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do confess having installed the GNU ports on Solaris multiple times. Unfortunely Aix and HP-UX servers were out of my control, thus scripts had to stay POSIX compatible for anything that had to run across all our servers, or written in Perl.

Oh sure, I still remember getting my first 1/4” tape of the GNU tools source code through the post. This is why it’s so hilarious to me when the kids nowadays complain that MacOS has different command line tools to Linux. “Why can’t they just use GNU?”. Get off my lawn! ;)

Also why when on a macOS system I never felt the urge to install Homebrew or something similar, it is just another UNIX flavour.

Re: Chimera Linux

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you imply, it's not really a standard unless there are multiple implementations. I am in favor of standardizing the behavior of libc and having multiple implementations that are commonly used.

There are many, many implementations of the C standard library. Every OS has one—even Windows. There are also many other POSIX ( UNIX-like ) operating systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD which have their own. Redox has a Rust-based C library called Relibc that even works on Linux. There are also other C libraries that work on Linux such as dietLibc and of course Bionic, which is the standard C library on Android. The…

> Every OS has one—even Windows

To note that this is only became a thing when the Universal C Runtime was introduced in Windows 10, until then is was pretty much "Every C compiler provides their own", which was the common approach on non-UNIX systems.

Re: Chimera Linux

#124
post #72

I think I'd be a lot more excited about this if it didn't seem to be bought into the wayland hype train. I feel like they made a lot of good decisions in being simple enough without too simple, and backwards compatible enough without too much legacy... but imho wayland doesn't fit in that same space for me (at least not yet.)

It seems like all the big name companies are 100% for Wayland, breaking compatibility with them seems like a hassle, regardless of how good Wayland itself is.

> It seems like all the big name companies are 100% for Wayland

nvidia?

> breaking compatibility with them seems like a hassle

They don't seem to be afraid of breaking compatibility -- witness deb/rpm, coreutils, glibc, etc...

Re: Chimera Linux

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add that most anti-GNU people I know in the BSD space and related projects are not at all against GNU politically speaking or it's ideals or the free software movement. We mostly think that a variety of terrible technical decisions have been made and allowed to metastisize over the years, and that they are largely unfixable so long as Linux remains an operating system devoted primarily to ease of use, popularity…

What are some good examples of where a BSD userland is much better than GNU userland? One thing that possibly comes to mind for me is macOS' launchd, which doesn't seem to give me the same headaches as systemd even though they're kind of the same thing (see also: windows services manager.) Another is/was clang/llvm vs. gcc, but gcc seems to have improved since clang originally came out. And clang is readily available…

HP-UX Vaults predate BSD jails, IBM ones on their mainframe and micros even more so.

Re: Chimera Linux

#126
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's pretty hard to feel slow on modern hardware, especially for x86 (I don't mean Chimera is slow though, I haven't tried it yet.)

Windows easily manages to feel slow, especially 11 did in the early days. I wonder how they do it...

Re: Chimera Linux

#128
post #81
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good news for you then, since there is a full distribution of xorg in the contrib repo and it's not expected to go away anytime soon (if ever)

Good to know. Their package search from the main site must not include contrib,though, as it only turns up wayland related packages, and nothing x11/xorg.

there is a combobox to pick the repository: https://pkgs.chimera-linux.org/packages?name=xserver-xorg*&r...

Re: Chimera Linux

#130
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 just a mandatory choice; the toolchain configuration doesn't really allow running anything else (glibc doesn't go together with clang+compiler-rt, they only very recently made it build with clang and that's still assuming a gcc-centric runtime as glibc actually dlopens libgcc_s, and every other libc is going to be much worse in terms of support)

i think you overstate how much trouble it is to port software to it; most software does not involve any porting in the first place, upstreams are not that reluctant, and as for firefox having a specific crash, have you reported it?

slowness is typically a default allocator issue and that does not apply to us (in fact, it may sometimes be faster)

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