Chimera is a general-purpose Linux-based OS born from unhappiness with
the status quo. We aim to create a system that is simple, transparent,
and easy to pick up, without having to give up practicality and a rich
feature set.
It is built from scratch using novel tooling, approaches, and userland.
Instead of intentionally limiting ourselves, we strive to achieve both
conceptual simplicity and convenience with careful and high quality
software design.
Read more for details.
Alternative userland.
Chimera uses a novel combination of core tools from FreeBSD,
the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library, delivering a fresh
experience with several major benefits.
Clean and consistent.
Chimera aims to eliminate legacy cruft where possible to deliver
a modern, general purpose, fully featured operating system that
is simple but complete.
Buildable from source.
Chimera is a binary distribution, but a source package build system
is provided, enabling easy packaging of new software, builds of
custom packages, and accessible infrastructure.
Portable.
You can use Chimera on all kinds of processors, including Intel/AMD,
ARM AArch64, POWER and RISC-V. Central build system ensures packages
are available everywhere.
March 13, 2026
Unless circumstances change, we are planning to retire support for the
big-endian 32-bit PowerPC and 64-bit POWER platforms. Read below for
when and why and how you can potentially change this.
Note that this is not about ppc64le, which is not affected by this.
Read more
December 20, 2025
The 20251220 set of images is now published.
This is an incremental refresh.
Read more
Copyright 2021-2025 Chimera Linux developers; Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.