, showing the FreeBSD Almquist shell The defining feature of Chimera Linux is a set of pragmatic choices that deviate from traditional Linux distribution assumptions about which components are used. The aim is to make Linux, as a complete operating system, leaner without limiting its functionality—or, as its original developer q66 (Nina Kolesová) puts it, to achieve 90 percent of the outcome with just 10 percent of the complexity. In selecting components, particular attention is paid to code quality and the correctness of their implementation. A core aspect of this approach is that the individual system components and their integration into a complete operating system are intentionally rethought simultaneously rather than in isolation. By doing so, Chimera Linux avoids the classic
chicken or the egg problem common in core system development: whether a new component shall be adapted to an existing system, or an existing system shall be reshaped to accommodate a new component. This design philosophy results in the following technical choices: •
doas from
OpenBSD for privilege escalation, instead of
sudo •
Wayland and as long as viable
X11 as the display protocols •
PipeWire for audio and multimedia • Alpine Package Keeper v3 for software compiled for Chimera Linux •
Flatpak for closed source software that is not built against musl libc • Several bootloaders, among them
Limine,
GNU GRUB,
systemd-boot and
Das U-Boot •
OpenZFS is available as a filesystem option These decisions are not eternally binding. If a better solution for a component becomes available, replacement is an option. A strict default security model, employing the in-development Dinit
init system and the
FreeBSD userland are some of the more radical approaches. Such changes would have been very hard for a distribution with an existing user base. ===
Package management ===
APK and cports Native software for Chimera Linux is distributed exclusively using APKv3 (Alpine Package Keeper 3 a.k.a. apk-tools) from
Alpine Linux. Nonetheless, Chimera does not re-use Alpine packages. It rather uses its own novel Python-based package build system cports inspired by xbps-src and initially to a lesser extent by abuild. , Chimera Linux was already using APKv3, at a time when this version was not yet adopted by Alpine Linux itself.
Flatpak Because Chimera Linux uses musl instead of glibc, some proprietary and closed-source applications that assume glibc compatibility cannot run without additional measures. To address this limitation,
Flatpak is included in the distribution. Flatpak allows applications to bundle their required runtime libraries and run in a sandboxed environment, making proprietary software such as
Steam available on Chimera Linux.
Desktop environments As of January 2026, the Chimera Linux repositories provide the following desktop environments: •
GNOME (official live image available) •
KDE Plasma (official live image available) •
Xfce •
Enlightenment •
LXQt (some components missing) == History ==