Although I wish the author commented about the experiences around the unique (administrative) bits of Chimera itself, such as:
- What's the package manager like, and how does it compare to say, pacman (especially in terms of update speeds and dependency handling)?
- What's it like working with dinit as opposed to systemd? Any annoyances, any compatibility issues with packages that expect systemd?
- Similarly, what's it like working with the FreeBSD userland, as opposed to GNU? Any script breakages due to differences in the switches? Because virtually every other distro ships with GNU coreutils, I would expect a decent chunk of popular scripts to fail on Chimera, if they weren't writen with BSD in mind. This is currently my biggest concern with Chimera. I also wonder if I can replace the BSD utils with the Rust uutils and without breaking things...
wezm•7mo ago
> - What's the package manager like, and how does it compare to say, pacman (especially in terms of update speeds and dependency handling)?
> - What's it like working with dinit as opposed to systemd? Any annoyances, any compatibility issues with packages that expect systemd?
It's unremarkable in a good way. It works and I've not encountered any issues as a user. I've not run into any compatibility issues, most systemd units are usually easily translated. I kinda miss having a centralised journal. I think that's something q66 wants to address at some point.
> - Similarly, what's it like working with the FreeBSD userland, as opposed to GNU? Any script breakages due to differences in the switches? Because virtually every other distro ships with GNU coreutils, I would expect a decent chunk of popular scripts to fail on Chimera, if they weren't writen with BSD in mind. This is currently my biggest concern with Chimera. I also wonder if I can replace the BSD utils with the Rust uutils and without breaking things...
Aside from the diff issue it's a non-issue. The Mac OS X userland is/was derived from them too, so there's already a lot of compatibility work been done. Most scripts that are intended to be run by a broad audience already stick to POSIX features.
0xRogue•7mo ago
I tried Chimera Linux a while back. I get that they’re going for a FreeBSD-like vibe with the ported userland and all, but not being able to use my NVIDIA GPU killed my interest. Also, it just felt kinda slow — no hard numbers, just my impression.
d3Xt3r•7mo ago
Although I wish the author commented about the experiences around the unique (administrative) bits of Chimera itself, such as:
- What's the package manager like, and how does it compare to say, pacman (especially in terms of update speeds and dependency handling)?
- What's it like working with dinit as opposed to systemd? Any annoyances, any compatibility issues with packages that expect systemd?
- Similarly, what's it like working with the FreeBSD userland, as opposed to GNU? Any script breakages due to differences in the switches? Because virtually every other distro ships with GNU coreutils, I would expect a decent chunk of popular scripts to fail on Chimera, if they weren't writen with BSD in mind. This is currently my biggest concern with Chimera. I also wonder if I can replace the BSD utils with the Rust uutils and without breaking things...
wezm•7mo ago
It's apk, so well known through Alpine Linux already. Dependency handling is elegant: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/apk/world
> - What's it like working with dinit as opposed to systemd? Any annoyances, any compatibility issues with packages that expect systemd?
It's unremarkable in a good way. It works and I've not encountered any issues as a user. I've not run into any compatibility issues, most systemd units are usually easily translated. I kinda miss having a centralised journal. I think that's something q66 wants to address at some point.
> - Similarly, what's it like working with the FreeBSD userland, as opposed to GNU? Any script breakages due to differences in the switches? Because virtually every other distro ships with GNU coreutils, I would expect a decent chunk of popular scripts to fail on Chimera, if they weren't writen with BSD in mind. This is currently my biggest concern with Chimera. I also wonder if I can replace the BSD utils with the Rust uutils and without breaking things...
Aside from the diff issue it's a non-issue. The Mac OS X userland is/was derived from them too, so there's already a lot of compatibility work been done. Most scripts that are intended to be run by a broad audience already stick to POSIX features.