In Greek mythology, the Chimera was a monster with a lion's body, a goat's head, and a snake for a tail. It is an ideal name for a distribution assembled from various parts of different operating systems and tools from diverse sources, ranging from FreeBSD core tools and Clang Power Tools to Alpine's apk-tools package manager and systemd's logind. This fresh approach makes Chimera Linux (Figure 1) [1] stand out from the dozens of distributions derived from a handful of long-established popular distributions. Here, nina (q66), Chimera Linux's project leader, goes into technical detail about this original distribution.

Linux Magazine (LM): What are the goals of Chimera Linux? Was there was a defining moment or incident that inspired it?

nina (q66): The goal is to rethink the way a Linux system works and is structured at the low level. I was always unhappy with how big distros are often opaque (i.e., difficult to see what's going on under the hood), clunky, and inflexible (i.e., difficult to adapt to different needs and slow to adopt modern enhancements in the compiler stack), while small distros are often made with a specific idea or feature in mind and the rest of the system suffers due to not having enough thought put into it, which limits its usability.

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