This initially threw me but it appears to be distinct from ChimeraOS, which is described as a, "Steam Big Picture based couch gaming OS".

Yeah, it's an unfortunate name collision. From Chimera Linux FAQ[1]:

The system also has no relation to ChimeraOS, besides the unfortunate name similarity. ChimeraOS used to be called GamerOS and renamed itself to ChimeraOS later; however, at this point Chimera Linux was already in public development with its name in place.

[1] https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-about-chimeraos

Chimera is developed by a former Void maintainer. It's still in its infancy compared to the two main "KISS" distributions (Alpine and Void) but it looks promising, especially thanks to dinit, which like S6 is what systemd should have been.

https://chimera-linux.org/docs/configuration/services

Then if a Linux kernel isn't a strict requirement, there's obviously NetBSD, from which Void takes inspiration. At last it's "the real thing" and not some adaptation, and a very underappreciated and overlooked Unix.

chimera definitely goes for its own type of experience, the source of the core tools does not make that much of a difference in that (they were mostly chosen for other reasons anyway)

that said i was a freebsd user for over a decade so it must have left some mark (even though generally the systems have little to do with each other in their general design)

People may not know that you are the creator of Chimera Linux.

There does seem to be a lot of BSD influence over Chimera with the BSD userland, Clang / LLVM toolchain, lack of glibc, and cports.

Regardless of the inspiration, the design choices in Chimera are great. Being able to standardize on things like Pipewire and Wayland without legacy. Working to bring the functionality of systemd without the monolith is great too. I hope Turnstile catches on.

ZFS on Chimera as well of course...