Chimera Linux is a Linux distribution striving for the minimum complexity of system configuration while retaining and expanding on the flexibility common to general purpose Linux based systems.

It uses musl as its libc implementation, userland tools from FreeBSD, and dinit as its init system.

For package management it uses apk-tools from Alpine Linux, but Chimera does not re-use Alpine packages, but instead uses its own novel package build system.

The distribution has no upstream and defines itself as "independent" from this perspective.

Chimera Linux was started in 2021 by former Void Linux maintainer "q66".

Chimera Linux makes use of userland components from FreeBSD, and the musl C library in-place of the GNU coreutils and glibc respectively.

A strict default security model, employing the in-development dinit init system and the FreeBSD userland are some of the more radical approaches. Such changes would have been very hard for a distribution with an existing user base.

Core userland from FreeBSD, and the LLVM toolchain are employed. In this the distribution provides an alternative to the common GNU-based systems, without explicitly excluding GNU tools or GPL licensed software in general.