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.

Chimera Linux was started by "q66" (who previously worked on Void Linux) in 2021 with the goal of creating a modern distribution that could "eliminate legacy cruft where possible" to provide a simple, practical desktop. In service of that goal, the project is based on BSD tools. Chimera's frequently asked questions page explains that unlike other projects that use those tools for licensing reasons, project picked BSD tools for their smaller code size and reduced complexity. Bootstrapping a modern Linux distribution is quite complex, with many packages that depend on other packages; using BSD tools allowed the project to avoid a lot of that complexity. For example, Chimera uses musl as its C library, which cuts out a lot of dependencies from the GNU C library.