The impulsive distro test
I decided to embark on a distro test. But which one? There's so many choices. Some distros get no love. So many you may not have heard of. Let's shine a spotlight on one. Let's try the distro at the less than enviable position of #100 on DistroWatch.com.
Today's winner is... Chimera Linux!
Here is the description per DistroWatch: "Chimera Linux is an independent distribution which uses an unusual combination of technologies behind the scenes. Chimera Linux uses BSD userland command line tools, the Clang/LLVM compiler toolchain, Dinit for service management, and APK for package management." Oh no. What have I gotten myself into?
Today's test bed is a VirtualBox VM. Interestingly there are some RiscV builds, but I grabbed the amd64 because that's my architecture. I had my choice of "base" "GNOME" and "Plasma." I went with Plasma on liveCD form. 2.1GB later, I'm setting up a profile and booting.
I'm given a generic GRUB prompt allowing me to select from Chimera and Chimera to RAM disk. I select the default. After waiting a considerably amount of time, nothing is happening. I'm regretting my choices already.
One quick search later and I've got the subreddit and the wisdom of all 556 members of the community at my disposal. They suggest checking the "Enable EFI" box (which is for "special OSes only".) No dice.
Given the lack of popularity of this distro, there isn't a heck of a lot of information available. I see someone was able to test the 20241027 version on VirtualBox. Let's try that. No dice either. Reading the documentation on the website provides no enlightenment. Well I'm stumped. I'm throwing in the towel here.
So what did we learn today? I learned that sometimes there's a reason unpopular things are unpopular. Defeated at step 0 is a new low for yours truly. I hope you enjoyed this rather brief journey to the bottom.
Apr 05 · 3 months ago
3 Comments ↓
👻 darkghost [OP] · Apr 06 at 11:08:
The classical Chimera is something like a lion with a goats head and a snake's tail. Real chimeras exist in animals but tend to be the mixing of two embryos to produce one individual. You may not know you're a chimera until genetic testing finds something odd. It's also one reason why DNA evidence isn't 100% certain.
The reference is to using an unholy combination of the Linux kernel, BSD userland, LLVM/clang compiler, and android package manager. I've had to kill -9 three_goats just to curry favor with the gods so they don't smite me for even thinking about running this.
🚀 stack · Apr 06 at 13:50:
I am getting too old to distro-hop, as proven by my FreeBSD fiasco. Well, not really a fiasco but I ended up really frustrated with getting every little bit to work right, annoyed by weird poorly documented ABI and stack alignment issues (only matters if you code in Assembler right to the kernel), and wound up losing the drive by somehow screwing up ZFS.
I also tried Alpine and some other small distro I can't even remember, and gave up rather quickly because I didn't feel like spending a week getting WiFi to work or get it to wake up after (permanently) suspending or whatever.
So I am sticking to XUbuntu for now, which is way better than anything else I tried so far, and most things work well right out of the box.
👻 darkghost [OP] · Apr 06 at 14:31:
I spent about an hour and a half trying to get chimera to boot. Time not well spent, particularly after a 60 hour work week.
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