Not just not GNU: they also ditch systemd for dinit, syslog-ng and a bunch of homegrown plumbing:

> We are also putting a lot of effort into writing fresh low-level plumbing. For example, Chimera comes with first-class and built-in support for user services and other things dependent on session tracking (such as a shared session bus), implemented from scratch thanks to our Turnstile project, finally bringing functionality previously only available on distributions using systemd. This is being implemented in a vendor-independent manner so that other distributions can adopt it.

Good to know. That was my first question.

I hope this means they also get rid of nonsense like pulseaudio and logind.

I’m a bit skeptical of the “shared session bus” though. Linux supports inode watches for things that want to react to configuration changes, and session busses add a ton of complexity (including a second authorization language, and a userland SPOF)

They use pipewire IIRC (which is 1.0 now!!).

And they have a custom alternative to login AIUI.

They’re working on it. The reason is explained in the FAQ.

For now they seem to be using a different alternative to do at least some of it. I think it was called elogind?

“I usually steer away from projects which are defined by what they are not. It seems to build a community whose roots are based in hostility.”

This is a somewhat ironic indictment of a project opting to avoid GNU. In fact, your quote could serve as a valid argument to avoid GNU. I cannot think of a project more completely defined by what it is not. I would certainly find it difficult to argue that GNU and its founder have not been a source of discord and hostility. The Open Source movement is a direct response to the hostile politics of GNU and Free Software.

In the case of Chimera Linux though, the founder has been pretty clear that they made their choices for engineering reasons and not political ones. There are lots of GNU packages in Chimera if you want them.

GNU is defined as what it is; that it is an operating system and that it is free software.

"What is GNU? GNU is an operating system that is free software—that is, it respects users' freedom."

https://www.gnu.org

Although GNU stands for "GNU is NOT Unix" that doesn't count as its a boomer hacker meme that started before GNU.

I'll add that most anti-GNU people I know in the BSD space and related projects are not at all against GNU politically speaking or it's ideals or the free software movement.

We mostly think that a variety of terrible technical decisions have been made and allowed to metastisize over the years, and that they are largely unfixable so long as Linux remains an operating system devoted primarily to ease of use, popularity, and packaged for non-professionals. A lot of this happened rather early on due to the influx of hobbyist programmers from the PC space, and so I think the GNU userland was mostly doomed from the beginning due to the qualifications (or lack thereof) of its programmers when important foundational design choices were made (they are better programmers and more professionally qualified these days, but they aren't about to roll back most of these foundational mistakes because it would collapse the whole thing like a tower of Jenga blocks).

Those goals actually align a lot with the GNU philosophies and so I support the Linux community fully in that way and for making free software available to as many as possible. But technically speaking, GNU userland is a pile of dog shit, and you've really got to rip it out and start from scratch like Chimera is doing as a bare minimum to actually make any kind of progress there.

Your statement is incredibly handwavy. GNU userland was doomed because the programmers were not professionals? Apart from the fact that many of the programmers were actually professionals, what were the design decisions that were made, keeping in mind that much of the userland design is essentially governed by posix.

Also if I look at many of the "professional" unixes userland tools I'd choose GNU userland any day, because the userland tools are incredibly handicapped, e.g. name one Solaris (or even better hp ux) core userland tool that is better than it's GNU equivalent.

What are some good examples of where a BSD userland is much better than GNU userland?

One thing that possibly comes to mind for me is macOS' launchd, which doesn't seem to give me the same headaches as systemd even though they're kind of the same thing (see also: windows services manager.)

Another is/was clang/llvm vs. gcc, but gcc seems to have improved since clang originally came out. And clang is readily available on linux distros.

BSD pioneered containers with jails (and zones on Solaris), but I have gotten used to (and perhaps come to appreciate) Linux's a-la-carte namespace/cgroups design. I don't really enjoy working with docker and kubernetes though.

One thing I like about FreeBSD is its documentation, which seemed (to me at least) to be reasonably clear, complete and well-organized.

I've liked NetBSD for a variety of reasons (somewhat coherent classic BSD organization, synchronized kernel and userland releases, great multiplatform support, support for classic systems and architectures, pkgsrc which works nicely across platforms and without root access, /usr/games, and just having a different kernel implementation) but I'm not sure I can point to individual utilities being better than their GNU alternatives.

> One thing that possibly comes to mind for me is macOS' launchd, which doesn't seem to give me the same headaches as systemd even though they're kind of the same thing (see also: windows services manager.)

XML definitions for service startup and inconsistent switches. Launchd is worse than systemd in those regards. I was quite happy to let go of my work iMac and do development on Linux.

Regarding XML, I greatly prefer (vs. XML or JSON) classic NeXT-style property lists, though sadly Apple deprecated those (GNUstep did not however.) In practice I tend to use an editor.

YMMV - as I mentioned, I think launchd, systemd, and windows service manager are in a similar space; it could be I just encountered launchd first, so I'm more comfortable with it. Also the transition to systemd on Linux (e.g. rc files to upstart to systemd) felt more jarring than the macOS launchd transition.

HP-UX Vaults predate BSD jails, IBM ones on their mainframe and micros even more so.

Interesting - I'm not familiar with HP-UX vaults - did they ever catch on in other Unix versions, and did they predate zones in Solaris? How do they compare to Linux containers?

That doesn't refute my statement that BSD pioneered containers with jails, as jails were widely used across multiple BSD versions (though they're oddly missing on macOS) before Linux's container architecture existed.

I had thought IBM did VMs rather than OS-level virtualization (wasn't Gene Amdahl the one who came up with the rules for classically virtualizable architectures?) but I'm not particularly familiar with IBM systems (though I have looked at the 360 instruction set, which has amazingly lasted for more than 50 years.)

HP-UX Vault were introduced in 1998, it was the other UNIXes that catched up to them, including BSD.

Sadly the way things went, it isn't that much relevant nowadays.

> did they predate zones in Solaris?

Yes.

I wrote a history of this stuff in 2011:

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/18/brief_history_o...

FreeBSD jails first, then Solaris Zones, then Linux containers.

Linux VServer came first but is not really a normal container implementation, although it has similarities.

HP-UX 10.24 seems to be 1996:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/9000_hpux/HPUX_Versions.txt

I know next to nothing about it though.

> That doesn't refute my statement that BSD pioneered containers with jails

I'd say that was a fair call.

> I had thought IBM did VMs rather than OS-level virtualization

It does both.

AIX calls its containers WPARs:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/spectrum-lsf/10.1.0?topic=tips-o...

> (wasn't Gene Amdahl the one who came up with the rules for classically virtualizable architectures?)

No, Popek and Goldberg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualizat...

FWIW I wrote a history of that, too:

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/14/brief_history_o...

Instead of disagreeing semi-anonymously with some of my personal experience/opinions, is anyone interested in actually answering my question?

Hyperbola GNU/Linux will be rebased soon under an OpenBSD 7.0 kernel and userland so you will get the both worlds: A GNU licensed OS without a bloated userland, we even got Xenocara. We don't even have DBUS. Emacs and notifications.el? write your own (notifications-notify) at ~/.emacs callling play from sox and herbe with (&rest arg) as the function arguments, where externally a script would suffice to call both as a single program.

On the GNU userland, something I hate it's the lack of integration. Emacs' calc shoudln't be calling Gnuplot, but GNU plotutils, at these should be enhanced to create 3D plots. Also, GNU Texinfo shoudln't be calling a full Texlive install to render math and PS/PDF files, but GNU Groff and geqn/gpic...

OFC

> If that's the aim then just state that.

At the top of the first page, under the Chimera Linux logo: "A modern, general-purpose non-GNU Linux distribution"

Came here to paste the same quote, just to highlight how disconnected from reality can be advertising "does not have to require endless setup" and then describe a rolling update distro, focused on power users and based on FreeBSD userland with a Linux kernel.

There is this bit (emphasis mine)

>This means Chimera is not a GNU/Linux system, as it utilizes neither GNU utilities, nor GNU libc, nor GNU toolchain. However, *the project is not anti-GNU/GPL*, and its userland choice is primarily technical. Users are generally free to use whichever software they like.

https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland

This quote from the faq literally made me laugh out loud:

>Another side of the coin is the so-called “systemd-free community”, which tends to spread a lot of misconceptions and frankly deranged opinions that end up hurting any sort of positive effort. Chimera as a project denounces such people, and is explicitly not a part of this community. Such people should also not view Chimera as some sort of haven, because it is not. The project is explicitly anti-elitist and aims to find constructive solutions.

https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq

Anyway, I wonder if they should be emphasizing security more on their homepage.

>Being a single lightweight package, it makes hardening the userland a lot easier too. It is possible to compile the Chimera userland with CFI and other techniques very easily, and it applies to all of the tools. With GNU tools trying to using these tends to fail, and addressing the issues becomes harder because it is out of our control and involves a much chunkier codebase where more can go wrong and where things are harder to track down.

https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq

I would like to see more security-focused operating systems. And simplicity is obviously quite valuable for security. Perhaps they could find a nice niche as an accessible, UX and desktop-focused competitor to OpenBSD? Qubes is nice for desktop security, but it requires a powerful machine, and also maybe I could run Chimera in a qube some day for defense-in-depth :-)

One advantage of a desktop focus is someday you could make money selling laptops with preinstalls. I'll bet a lot of people would buy a cheap security-focused laptop to manage critical accounts, infrastructure, private keys even. Especially big companies that care about security. Then roll your profits into creating a great bug bounty program for your OS, in a virtuous cycle.

i believe you are just making assumptions here; debian in this context does not count as a "simple system", if anything it's as complex as a distro can be and its packaging approach is a polar opposite of chimera's

i still like debian either way, because it's a nice community with good values/principles that has provided and still provides great value to the ecosystem, but it can also often be very fragile

the "just works" point of chimera stems from how things are built; everything it comes with is made to be "install and go" without having to go extra length to enable and set it up (while still being entirely transparent to the user), while being deterministic (packages in general don't rely on install hooks etc.) to ensure safe upgrades and easy auditing, and all that in a framework of a system that has a fraction of the complexity of a large distro and is maintainable by a small team

we make it consistently clear that it's not a reactionary project (https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq, https://floss.social/@chimera_linux/111553324359284350, etc) and has no hostility to GNU or any of the projects we use alternatives to by default (and anybody displaying such hostility is unwelcome in the community)