I've had no luck with any of the Wayland desktops I've tried on this loongarch machine. All fail to start with one error or another related to graphics. X11 XFCE session seems to be working ok though.
Performance is not amazing but seems decent. E.g. browsing the modern web seems fine, including JS heavy sites like Mastodon and Mattermost. Speedometer result and allsorts build time for reference.
(this toot posted from the machine)
#screenshot of my #raspberrypi zoo running #chimeraLinux #proxmox #pxvirt #raspberrypios #freedombox
I got Chimera installed on the loongarch mini-PC. Installation was very smooth, basically identical to an x86_64 install. I also installed GNOME, but gnome-shell is unstable. I can log in and poke around for a brief amount of time, but then it crashes and I'm back at the login screen. Looks like I have my first project there.
Full steam ahead on my GMKtec NucBox M5 Plus AMD Ryzen™ 7 5825U machine running #chimeraLinux
The box came with 32 GB (2 x 16GB DDR4 SODIMMs) of RAM.
The RAM itself is almost twice as expensive today as what I payed for the entire machine im March last year.
I'm pretty happy that I upgraded it to 64GB of RAM and added a 2nd SSD when pricing was still sane.
I swaped the SSD it came with for a Samsung SSD PM991a 1TB drive and added a 2TB MSI Spatium M461 SSD
It runs as my local chimera linux repo mirror, chimera-live image builder and cports dev workstation.
Decided that today is the day to start playing around with #cports and testing out the soon to be official #mesa package for #chimeralinux
🐧 Chimera Linux works toward a simplified desktop
｢ Chimera Linux is a new distribution designed to be ""simple, transparent, and easy to pick up"". The distribution is built from scratch, and recently announced its first beta release. While the documentation and installation process are both a bit rough, the project already provides a usable desktop with plenty of useful software — one built primarily on tools adopted from BSD ｣
Spent the evening messing around with Alpine Linux (refresher) and Chimera Linux (all new to me) as full Plasma desktops.
Not sure which one I like better but they both kinda impress upon me that perhaps 'mainstream' Linux is headed in the wrong direction. They both feel lean, mean, and up to date compared to other 'normal' distros.
All the main productivity apps are available via flatpak so being musl based doesn't matter except for Nvidia drivers and perhaps dev work that explicitly requires GNU libs/tools.
Intrigued by the BSD userland on Chimera. Does this make Chimera a 'real UNIX'? Ha! A UNIX Kernel required technically I guess.
Chimera's repos aren't as full as Alpine's but flatpak makes it not matter. Mind you, this was before realizing there was a 'user repo' that could be configured. Similar to AUR in a way...perhaps?
Dinit is cool, seems very similar to Alpine's initrc.
Will have to do some experiments on physical hardware (zfs).
time to check out the new #chimeraLinux images
and give the new TUI installer a once over
@transicorn age 48 happily running #chimeraLinux on anything I can get my hands on. After 34 years of #linux it just feels nice to work with a fast, clean , well thought out Distribution with a very nice community that gives a fuck and doesn't suck up to some Corporate Overlords.
Linux for the People by the People. As it should be.
Sent some dollars to the #FreeBSD Foundation in their year-end donation drive as a small token of my appreciation for the code that powers most of https://github.com/chimera-linux/chimerautils
@TheOneDoc Putting #ChimeraLinux on the top of my next distros-list :ms_eyes:
When I was little my father told me to judge the worth of a person by there enemies and that's why #ChimeraLinux is the best Linux Distribution out there for me.
Got some time today and finished the initial setup of the Raspberry Pi 500+
It's running KDE Plasma 6.5.3 on Chimera Linux, Kernel Version 6.12.60-0-rpi
It always impresses me how much snapier Chimera feels on a Pi compared to Raspberry Pi OS (Debian Trixie)
In case anyone wants to try a similar setup (ROOT on btrfs, SWAP partition, ZSWAP, KDE) to mine I posted a thread how I did it a while ago
https://tech.lgbt/@TheOneDoc/114025829219311283
and here's the fix for the SDDM hickup mentioned in there
https://tech.lgbt/@TheOneDoc/114049037887110429
#chimeraLinux #kde #kdeplasma #raspberrypi #raspberrypi500plus #screenshot
New Chimera Linux RaspberryPi Image created and about to be written on a KingSpec XG7000 2TB SSD drive
So my Raspberry Pi 500+ has finally arrived today.
Guess I'll have to figure out if anything needs packaging for #chimeraLinux
my guess would be
https://github.com/raspberrypi/keyboard-firmware
and
I think Chimera Linux is an intriguing mix of components: Linux kernel, FreeBSD userland, apk package manager, (non-systemd) dinit. I checked it out briefly last year. Now I want to take a second, closer look.
Installed Chimera Linux with Root-on-ZFS with ZFS native encryption and ZFSBootMenu as bootloader on a VM. Time to explore!
and here's how I build my #raspberrypi (4/5) #chimeraLinux AARCH64 image
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chimera-linux/chimera-live
cd chimera-live/
doas ./mkrootfs-platform.sh -P rpi -p 'plasma-desktop xserver-xorg fastfetch flatpak smartmontools ufw firefox thunderbird libreoffice networkmanager bash bash-completion' -- -a aarch64 -r /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-eac460a8-b630-4c50-b5fa-ae8f2670d5d3/@chimera/current/main
doas ./mkimage.sh -s 16G -c none chimera-linux-aarch64-ROOTFS-20251125-rpi.tar.gz
xz -9 -e -v chimera-linux-aarch64-IMAGE-20250903-rpi.img
-r /path/to/chimerarepo
I prefer xz compressed images over the default gz one
Yes, you can write that image via Pi Imager.
Someone asked me how I build my custom #chimeraLinux live image for AMD64 (x64)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chimera-linux/chimera-live
cd chimera-live/
doas ./make-release.sh -r /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-eac460a8-b630-4c50-b5fa-ae8f2670d5d3/@chimera/current/main
doas ./mklive-image.sh -b plasma -p 'fastfetch flatpak smartmontools ufw firefox thunderbird libreoffice networkmanager bash bash-completion qemu-guest-agent-dinit spice-vdagent-dinit' -- -f plasmakvm
-r /path/to/chimerarepo
Number of files in #Debian 13 /etc: 2727
Number of files in #ChimeraLinux live environment /etc/: 289
Yeah, I think we're gonna get along. 😂
