(idk what that title is sorry)

Recently I mentioned that I found an old laptop I found in my storage shelves and decided to do something with it. Initially the plan was OpenBSD but since I wanted to maybe put some games (Factorio) on it and have a working WM (this laptop has a Nvidia GPU), I decided to stay in Linux land. But this gave me an excuse:

I could finally try out Chimera Linux. I’ve had my eye on this since the maintainer made a very clear anti-LLM statement (you know I’m a sucker for good ethics). It also has a whole bunch of other interesting features:

• FreeBSD-like userland
• dinit instead of systemd
• apk as the package manager
• musl instead of glibc
• doas instead of sudo

However, this laptop had a dead battery and a known overheating problem. Resolving these was surprisingly easy: iFixIt had a compatible battery in stock (70eu ouchie) and new thermal paste and thermal tape was about 15eu. There’s a bunch of guides on how to make this laptop model more heat resilient which basically just boils down to “put a more thermal tape in certain places”. About 30 minutes of that, I had a laptop that could boot and run for several hours in Debian without randomly dying (foreshadowing). Now that the preliminary stuff was done I could move onto installing Chimera.

This was a far less painful process than that time I installed Gentoo in QEMU. However, there were some weird things. The installation instructions are almost amazing. They make assumptions and leave out some clarifying words that would have prevented 1 failed install. Thankfully, someone has a fork of Chimera which uses glibc instead of musl for compatability reasons, called “Casuarina”. Why “thankfully”? Well the maintainer of this rewrote the install guide and added in some clarifications and missing info (albeit they went with systemd-boot instead of GRUB but ironically that section helped).

There’s not much really to say with the install process. Having iwd work immediately was amazing; having to redo my partitions 3 times wasn’t fun. But the main issue was actually this laptops’ firmware not being particularly nice with GRUB. The --removable flag solved that though after one entirely unneeded reinstall.

Then there was the next stage of getting a greeter to work. Short story: greetd and tui-greet are a wonderful combo. Installed niri and got my dotfiles. A few quirks dealing with the FreeBSD-like userland (this actually improved some scripts) and I got my swaybg and swayidle scripts working. Some more usual things and it’s all good to go.

Yep.

I was hesitant about dinit after my time really enjoying OpenRC. That was silly of me. dinit is wonderful. I was able to setup custom services in 3 lines per service. Insane.

I knew the userland and musl changes would cause some problems once I started trying to build some projects but it seems to only be a single OpenSSL dep doing this, so that shouldn’t be too annoying too resolve…?

Unfortunately, there is one mystery problem that I remember this laptop having before, except now I can recreate it! Sometimes it will just randomly reboot and nothing shows up in the logs. If I visit <newsblur.com> in any browser and wait 5 - 10 seconds, it will happen. I have a suspicion it’s GPU related, but I need to validate that somehow. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if Newsflash worked, but it doesn’t which is most peculiar. I will continue trying to figure this one out because I need my RSS feeds (although I plan on moving away from Newsblur after 13 years since the slop coding is now strong there). This no longer happens. I am now more perplexed

A final gripe with Chimera is again due to musl and the strictness of cports (these are both things I very much agree with however): I have to use Flatpak for certain things. And I don’t like Flatpak because it is very good at wasting space. It has been a few years since I used it so maybe it’s less ridiculous now, but we’ll see. There’s also a delightful bug with Niri currently where no Flatpak apps can access the clipboard or vice-versa. Having to install Bitwarden via Flatpak makes it a bit useless…

Overall, I like Chimera so far. It’s making me think in yet another way but also needing to find replacements for things (hurry up and finish plz #5506). Let’s see what happens when I start actually developing with it. It’s a slight shame since I wanted to move away from Niri and Waybar (ravaged by slop) on a machine I would use often before making whatever my replacements. Maybe I’ll just do that in a VM instead. And then eventually I’ll change my main PC to use Gentoo. One day.