Nostr notes by Gourd

Early #ChimeraLinux (https://chimera-linux.org/) opinions: ...

2026-10-31T02:50:10Z

Early #ChimeraLinux (https://chimera-linux.org/) opinions:
Checked out this distro due to it being on the lists of distros with a strong anti-AI policy on ethics grounds, but it's interesting in its own right?

It's a combination of FreeBSD userland and the musl libc (which is smaller, no-slop, and may be slower in some cases) which I'll need to see how it works out in my use cases resource-wise (it's a canidate to shove on a particular laptop in for repairs if NetBSD doesn't work out on the memory front).

The init manager is dinit, which my initial impressions of are pretty positive. It's got the limited scope of say, OpenRC, but has a lot more systemd unit style syntax. Which to be honest, I just prefer over writing bash scripts that have to perform very formulaic roles. Less room for error/boilerplate. It also does user services in a more intuitive manner.

APK as the package manager is fast. I think it might be faster than my previous impression of the fastest package manager, pacman. I'm curious if there's a way to remove individual KDE packages without it deleting unrelated KDE packages, a lot of the default KDE apps are... not stuff I install on Gentoo.

The repos are idosyncratic in their coverage. It's not the largest, but there's a good set of stuff I normally have to pull from third party repos (for instance, Librewolf). Still needed a lot of augmentation from Flatpak, and surprisingly didn't have Signal given what I would guess. Lots of stuff like opentmux (tmux pre-AI code fork).

Speaking of which, the choice of musl libc means that flatpak is pretty much the only way to install proprietary apps like Steam. I am worried given the talks of Flatpak getting a hard systemd dependency in the future how this will pan out in the long run. (Presumably we get another elogind-esque broken out bit of systemd code...)

musl libc also breaks proprietary drivers like the NVIDIA drivers

Interesting, and I'll keep it in mind for my systems too low power or irregularly used to do Gentoo compilation on stuff for. It's rolling release, which I like given the tendency of OS major version upgrades to just brick on me.

One thing I've run into on NetBSD that's both surprising ...

2026-10-02T01:09:01Z

One thing I've run into on NetBSD that's both surprising and unsurprising: when using pip to install Python packages, there's no prebuilt wheels as far as I can tell so there's a lot of time spent building the native code extensions.

This plus decade old laptop just requires some patience. :ac_disagreement:

It is amazing how without fail search engines respond to ...

2026-10-01T12:00:52Z

It is amazing how without fail search engines respond to searching for #NetBSD resources with pages related to FreeBSD. Also it's hilarious how bad slop pages for NetBSD are. Just referring to Linux and FreeBSD commands, configuration, and packages that do not exist on NetBSD.

#NetBSD trip report: This reminds me highly of setting up Arch ...

2026-09-26T04:35:55Z

#NetBSD trip report: This reminds me highly of setting up Arch Linux in the mid-late 00's. Including being very confused how to get PulseAudio to work. :ac_laughter:

On the plus side, the wifi card in this laptop works (an Intel one) although the speed is maxing out at 54 mbits/sec. Graphics performance is pretty good as well given the Intel onboard GPU from a Broadwell CPU. Just need to figure out how to get sound to work...

(Intel HDA audio. audiocfg test has worked, but so far nothing else has...)

@nprofile…hwts Found an old #NetBSD mailing list post (2012) ...

2026-09-23T20:30:48Z

nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpqehqqyt5jh45wuct6jzls5e2fdu8anf3ddd348jvj0sjhkxkde9lscfhwts (nprofile…hwts) Found an old #NetBSD mailing list post (2012) with a short source for kernel module implementing disabling Optimus NVIDIA cards...

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2012/08/31/msg011341.html

Running #NetBSD 11.0 (from this year) on my 1997 Pentium MMX 233 ...

2026-08-22T00:10:16Z

Running #NetBSD 11.0 (from this year) on my 1997 Pentium MMX 233 MHz system out of curiosity, and it's facinating how the OS can boot relatively fast, text mode applications still usually launch snappily, but it takes five minutes for fontconfig to update the cache.

It also fails the "can this play Doom" test amusingly with Chocolate Doom: Chocolate Doom's setup program is too much for it to handle under Xorg between the S3 Virge GPU, 128 MB of RAM, and CPU.

Still really cool it works as well as it does on a system this old and supports all the hardware in it, though. And it can even touch the internet without me being worried of it being killed by long-lasting internet background malware radiation from the 90's! :ac_laughter:

#retrocomputing