There’s no doubt that 2026 will bring plenty of new Linux releases, with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS likely being the most anticipated, set to arrive at the end of April. But this article isn’t about the usual names that tend to dominate the conversation year after year.
Instead, I want to focus on two relatively new projects that left a strong impression on me in 2025. What sets them apart is their originality: they aren’t built on top of existing distributions, and they take genuinely fresh approaches to how a Linux system can be designed and function.
And no, this isn’t about the wave of immutability that defined much of 2025, nor about distributions overloaded with tools in an attempt to be everything to everyone.
Chimera Linux is quite different from Alpine. They both use APK and MUSL (and the Linux kernel) but that is all they have in common. And Chimera uses a different memory allocator than Alpine, so the even MUSL is quite different between the two.
I would say the closest distro to Chimera Linux is the MUSL version of Void Linux.
Chimera Linux has a full userland, mostly based on FreeBSD, while Alpine uses BusyBox. This is because Chimera Linux is meant to be a full “batteries included” general purpose Linux distro. Even though Chimera Linux uses APK, it has a totally different approach to building packages via the Cports system which is the best I have found on Linux. Chimera started with the idea that the Void Linux package build system could be improved. The innovations kept coming until a whole new distro was born.
Chimera Linux uses very little GNU software (none installed by default I think) and is a non-systemd distro. This includes using Clang / LLVM instead of GCC. So it is quite unique in the Linux world.
My choice of DE on Chimera is KDE Plasma or Niri but the lead developer uses GNOME. They plan to make GNOME work on dinit (not systemd). So, that will be quite unique as well.