Just Enough Chimera Linux | Hacker News Reader

Just Enough Chimera Linux

dwarmstrong.org

69 pointsspeckx24 comments

For those that like the LLVM/musl/mimalloc choices of chimera, but also want signed commits, signed reviews, container-native design, full source bootstrapping, 100% deterministic builds, and multi-party-signed artifacts check out https://stagex.tools

Really love that project. Is there any planned support for NVIDIA drivers and runtime?

If anyone sponsors buying me modern Nvidia cards with open kernel support, I would gladly test and support them.

I have a RTX 2080 to give away. Interested?

I was about to say I would need a newer gen card to test the new open kernel driver stack, but on some research it appears that the 2080 series was the first to support them, and with that new knowledge I realized I have a 2080Ti on hand already.

So thanks for offering yours. It made me remember I actually own one!

Don't get mimalloc and mallocng mixed up though, completely different animals.

100%, and it is indeed mimalloc, though you can also use glibc or mallocng if needed.

The website you linked says mallocng?

Out of date. We just merged mimalloc as the default last release.

Now this is WHY I love UNIX and UNIX-likes, the fact you can chop and change core components like the Kernel, Userspace, Init, etc. and (within compatibility limits i.e. MUSL/GLIBC) run a hybrid system like Chimera.

Would I run Chimera as a daily-drive? Probably not. Is it cool that someone can? Absolutely!

When I last looked a few years ago, there were some efforts and successes in the far East doing "chimera Windows", mostly based on running an older userland (like XP) on a newer kernel (10).

There is the Anglophone https://loss32.org/ project for a Linux distro with a Win32 desktop. It's #loss32 on Libera Chat.

Speaking of OpenZFS encryption, has there ever been any third party review of the source code? Or any testing of any kind of its effectiveness?

This seems interesting, but I've been using Alpine as a desktop distro wth ZFS for years now, it has native support and ZBM is available in the community repo. Not sure what advantages Chimera would add.

Chimera uses mimalloc instead of musl’s mallocng.

https://chimera-linux.org/docs/configuration/musl

Alpine and Chimera however both are not reproducible or full source bootstrapped or signed and do not enforce code review. I would honestly steer clear of both for anything but low risk hobby use cases.

IMO they should be best thought of as research projects useful for reference by distros designed for production use.

I've switched to Chimera from Alpine a few months ago. It's much nicer for desktop use. The service supervision is great, and many things that require some setup on Alpine just work out of the box. The packaging system is nicer too, though it does have less stuff already packaged.

Interesting. Not sure I'll try it because I have my setup very refined (although I use awesomewm so it's maybe a little simpler to switch anyway) and I'm long past the age of testing out new distros for fun. Not to familiar with dinit but I've been waiting for s6 to be usable with Alpine for a while now. How do you think it compares?

Do you notice any performance advantages on Chimera?

I haven't used s6 much, so I can't really comment on that, but Chimera tends to boot significantly faster on the same hardware, compared to Alpine with OpenRC, mostly because of dinit's parallel initialization.

As for system performance, mimalloc's effect isn't particularly noticeable in regular use. Or maybe I just don't stress the allocator often enough. There may be more daemons running by default, but they are also activated on demand if you aren't using them, so YMMV on that.

For desktop use, it feels like an early (but already quite usable) version of what a respectable systemd replacement would look like, and I think that's its greatest strength in practice.

Very cool and interesting.. Just found out it was started by a previous Void Linux maintainer, Void linux is great as well!

if you want a stable chimera linux as a daily driver, go to voidlinux.org. chimera linux started as a void linux fork until it became it's own thing. they share the same dna. cbuild started as a xbps-src fork.

no it didn't

source: made the thing

I don't need politics on my desktop, so no to Chimera Linux.

What politics?

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