Chimera Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Chimera Linux Average rating 8.9 from 13 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. 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: -- 2025122020241204 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: 3 Date: 2025-09-14 Votes: 0 been checking out ChimeraLinux multiple times over the past two years for its appealing features, but inevitably revert to more stable distributions due to a recurring issue where sound is lost after rebooting. despite the main developer's helpfulness whenever the problem arises, it becomes tiresome to repeatedly request fixes. the sound issues range from ALSA being overly restrictive, inconsistent sound card persistence, and firmware-sof complications. notably, my hardware—while not high-end runs flawlessly on all major distributions without encountering such problems. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250420 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-08-13 Votes: 12 Chimera Linux, the distribution that does not clutter. Two of it's designgoals are reproducibility and statelessness. This means that no garbage is piling up in the root part of the filesystemtree and that the whole system can be functionally reproduced if you have a backup of the /etc/apk/world file (the list of explicitly installed packages) and know which Dinit services were enabled. I used to distrohop for many years but since I found Chimera I go always back to it, because it stays so clean and just runs once it is installed. I use it with an M.2 SSD in a USB case that looks like a thumb drive with the XFS filesystem on it. That way I can use one installed system on several computers. I can boot it even on my MacBook 12 from 2017 and it works quite well. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250420 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-05-14 Votes: 126 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 See all 13 reader reviews of Chimera Linux...