Chimera Linux with BSD userland and dinit instead of systemd will be released in March

The makers of Chimera Linux want to release a first alpha build of the distro in late February or early March. Chimera Linux is Linux distro with BSD userland and no GNU. It works on all architectures and runs dinit instead of systemd.

The makers of the operating system presented their progress at Fosdem 2023, an open source software conference. There, lead developer Daniel Kolesa says that Chimera end of this month or early next month becomes available as the first alphabuild. The alpha period lasts from six months to a whole year. During that time, new features are added and existing ones are further developed. The makers also want to work on better documentation. Previously, the makers have already gotten Gnome working as a desktop interface.

Chimera Linux is a Linux distribution that uses tools from FreeBSD and uses LLVM as a toolchain. Chimera runs on standard Intel and AMD chips, as well as Aarch64 and Risc-V architectures. It is striking that the distro uses dinit instead of systemd by default, which is the case with almost no other Linux distro.

The makers of the OS say that they have now got disk encryption working and that CKMS has been chosen as the kernel module. The developers are still working on updating several software packages. Chimera uses apk tools for that. It also needs to be arranged that packages are automatically updated.