Chimera Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Chimera Linux Average rating 9.4 from 11 review(s) What are your thoughts on Chimera Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 2025042020241204 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 20250420 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-05-14 Votes: 94 This distribution *should* be the future of Linux. I hope that it gains the interest it deserves. The live disk offers a Grub menu option of running from RAM, which allows the live environment to run pretty fast if you have enough RAM space. I used the live disk containing the Gnome desktop environment and everything works great and it is fast. After playing around in the live environment, I installed it on My Dell Precision 3561 laptop. The disk partition I used is EFI with an unencrypted boot partition and LVM+LUKS on the rest of the disk. The install process is manual, but it is much easier than Arch. It is even easier to install than Void when using disk encryption. The Chimera documentation on installation is excellent. If the documented install process is followed, installation is easy. The dinit system and apk package manager are both simple to use and just work. Everything about this distribution is modern and the choices made in building it have resulted in a rock solid system. The main drawback of using Chimera is the relatively small selection of packages in repositories compared to big distributions such as Arch, NixOS, Debian, etc. The inclusion of flatpak and distrobox in the Chimera repositories allows a work around. I have installed several packages from outside Chimera, and they work as expected. I am amazed that this is largely a one man (or one woman) development. That brings up the second main weakness of Chimera. This project is very new, the developer team is tiny, and that means the project could potentially disappear. I really hope not. Chimera has the potential to replace many of the bigger and older distros. Cruft is eliminated, and the Linux/Unix philosophy of each component doing one job well has been embraced. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250420 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-05-10 Votes: 99 Chimera proves that it is perfectly possible to make an excellent desktop system out of alternative technologies, such as musl and dinit. I am really grateful for Chimera increasing the awareness of dinit especially. Hopefully this can lead to make distros adopting it. I am running a relatively simple system with KDE Plasma as the desktop. It is very snappy and stable. Updates are rolling, but I feel less at risk when going a bit without upgrading - compared to for example Arch. Just be ready for an installation process that requires the use of the terminal and reading of the documentation. Luckily the instructions are quite good. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250214 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-04-09 Votes: 24 Chimera Linux is a beautiful experience with the right compromise between a Gentoo distribution and a Slackware. Everything works perfectly and it's very responsive. It is possible to have wide maneuverability in the desktop and bash environment. It's very pleasant to use and you get a sense of how the environment is a single idea that has developed. THE problem is: not having a “Legal Linux” userland some things don't work. ROCM for example, some video card solutions or some programs. When possible these can be found on Flatpack, the distribution relies heavily on that. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 11 reader reviews of Chimera Linux...