We talked about Chimera Linux before – it’s a unique coupling of the Linux kernel with a FreeBSD userland, musl, the package manager from Alpine Linux, and dinit. The project recently entered the alpha stage, and while not ready for everyday use, Wesley Moore still decided to try and give it a go.
So far my experience has actually been better than I expected. Since I installed it I have not rebooted back into Arch. This isn’t the first time I’ve run a desktop musl system and I was prepared to encounter incompatible software more often than I did. Flatpak really helps fill the gaps there.
As the alpha announcement suggested, I have run into the odd bug here and there but for the most part the system is remarkably polished and stable. I plan to keep using it as the primary OS on my laptop, including its Framework 13 AMD replacement that should arrive Q4 2023.
That’s good news. Chimera is one of the more interesting operating system projects out there, and it’s headed by the same person who used to run the Void Linux for POWER hardware project, so there’s some real pedigree here.
> it’s a unique coupling of the Linux kernel with a FreeBSD userland, musl, the package manager from Alpine Linux, and dinit.
This sentence seems to imply that musl is Alpine’s package manager.
It is a list. Chimera uses MUSL as the C library and also uses APK ( the Alpine Linux Package Manager ).
This article mirrors my experience as well.
I am really excited for Chimera Linux. I am more interested in using Podman / Distrobox than Flatpak to fill in the application gap but that is just personal preference.