Chimera Linux

A modern, general-purpose Linux distribution

Chimera is a general-purpose Linux-based OS born from unhappiness with<br>the status quo. We aim to create a system that is simple, transparent,<br>and easy to pick up, without having to give up practicality and a rich<br>feature set.

It is built from scratch using novel tooling, approaches, and userland.<br>Instead of intentionally limiting ourselves, we strive to achieve both<br>conceptual simplicity and convenience with careful and high quality<br>software design.

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Alternative userland.

Chimera uses a novel combination of core tools from FreeBSD,<br>the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library, delivering a fresh<br>experience with several major benefits.

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Clean and consistent.

Chimera aims to eliminate legacy cruft where possible to deliver<br>a modern, general purpose, fully featured operating system that<br>is simple but complete.

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Buildable from source.

Chimera is a binary distribution, but a source package build system<br>is provided, enabling easy packaging of new software, builds of<br>custom packages, and accessible infrastructure.

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Portable.

You can use Chimera on all kinds of processors, including Intel/AMD,<br>ARM AArch64, POWER and RISC-V. Central build system ensures packages<br>are available everywhere.

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Recent news (feed)

March 13, 2026

Plans to possibly retire the big-endian PowerPC/POWER platforms

Unless circumstances change, we are planning to retire support for the<br>big-endian 32-bit PowerPC and 64-bit POWER platforms. Read below for<br>when and why and how you can potentially change this.

Note that this is not about ppc64le, which is not affected by this.

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December 20, 2025

New images

The 20251220 set of images is now published.

This is an incremental refresh.

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Copyright 2021-2025 Chimera Linux developers; Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.