Chimera - Linux alike OS based on LLVM and Musl

johnh · February 13, 2023, 11:52am

photor · January 30, 2024, 6:26am

What’s the point? There are already too many OS.

Palli · January 30, 2024, 12:12pm

The point seems to be “not GNU” userland, e.g. not GNU libc, and/or not systemd.

systemd took over from other init system in most Linuxes, e.g. Ubuntu, and is pretty hated, so many distros were forked. I don’t think this affects most end-users (in a bad way, most do not know or care).

The guy came from FreeBSD, which is likely the major BSD Unix-like, except for macOS, which both have non-GNU userland. People there tend to like FreeBSD for for ideological reasons, not copyleft code, GNU GPL and/or think it’s better code (some also that it/their BSD kernels better, but I think this guy realizing it’s not, but only the userland, I’m not sure, he may be wrong on that).

[The userland, like the kernel of default GNU/Linux is still copyleft, but historically GPLv2, now GPLv3, unlike the kernel, still GPLv2. I’m not even sure that’s a real problem, but for some GPLv3, even “GPLv2 and later” licenced, is at least a perceived problem, i.e. claiming that GPL copyleft has been ruined.]

I think he realized like me, that Linux has a viable market share, and FreeBSD (and OpenBSD etc) with tiny, will not, and maybe we don’t need that much diversity in the free OS department.

There’s a reason for all the Free OS/Linux diversity, at least perceived reasons, you buy into the it on several levels from UI, Android UI/toolkit vs. incompatible X and/or Wayland (or Mir!), Android libc vs GNU libc, vs musl, vs lots of other options.

github.com

davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISON

Comparison of Dinit with other supervision / init systems
=========================================================

This is intended to be an objective description of the differences between Dinit and several
other similar software packages. Due to a myriad of details, it is difficult to provide a very
meaningful comparison without going into great detail (which this document does not). It does,
however, serve as a short survey of service supervision and init systems, and provides a starting
point for understanding the unique features of, and ideas embodied in, the Dinit system and some
of its alternatives.


Tenets of Dinit's design
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Before comparing with other systems, it's important to understand that Dinit is designed with
certain basic principles in mind:


1. Robustness (including allocation robustness)

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The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

I think the next priority should be supporting Android (not iOS, Apple basically killed off free apps with their response to EU court judgement, and wasn’t my priority even before).

Not this OS, and I foresee some small problems regarding that (or maybe it just works already and I’m wrong)despite Julia having a separate musl version.

Musl is a good libc, probably interesting to support for the future, GNU libc is a bit bloated, but is it a real problem to just use it? Linux has a nolibc option (but it doesn’t support multithreading), I would rather want someone making a Julia for Cosmopolitan libc, for cross-platform apps across Windows, macOS and Linux…