Casuarina Linux is a Linux distribution derived from Chimera Linux. It is comprised of these major components:
This differs from Chimera Linux in that glibc is used instead of musl libc. This helps make Casuarina binary compatible with the wider GNU/Linux ecosystem. The drawback is the system ends up less elegant than Chimera Linux, and bootstrapping requires gcc, and GNU binutils in addition to LLVM.
Presently only the x86_64 architecture is supported, although there are plans to add aarch64 as
well. There are no plans to support other architectures as they rarely see pre-compiled binaries and
thus are less likely to benefit from Casuarina’s binary compatibility. In those cases it makes
sense to use Chimera.
Casuarina is a general-purpose, rolling release distribution. It is well suited to desktop systems, but can be used on servers too. If your workload permits, Chimera is probably the better choice for servers, since it’s simpler and less experimental.
I’ve (wezm) wanted a distro like this for a long time. My earliest experiments are from 2019. Some of my notes from then can be read at uld.wezm.net. You’ll notice a lot of overlap between Chimera and what I described in 2019:
When I discovered Chimera in 2021 it was almost exactly what I’d been looking for. I followed development closely until the alpha release, at which time I installed it on my laptop (secondary) computer. From that point on the eventual goal was to run it on my desktop (primary) computer too. I inched closer, but found the incompatibility with the wider GNU/Linux ecosystem that musl brought with it limiting.
Some of my standard tools were difficult to use without compatibility crutches like Distrobox. Some things that required workarounds included:
Some of these were needed for my day job. Whilst I did manage to do my job on Chimera for two
weeks, it was compromised. E.g. we pin a specific Rust version, but without
rustup support I could only use the latest stable, and I had to run Beyond Compare via an Arch
Distrobox.
Flatpak brings in an additional userland, and Distrobox does the same. For my particular uses cases, the simplicity of Chimera felt significantly eroded. For this reason I decided to see what it would take to build a distro with the Chimera tooling, that is binary compatible with the wider GNU/Linux ecosystem.
main completed 14 Mar 2026.The Casuarina infrastructure mirrors Chimera pretty closely. When setting up machines I tried to use systems and parts I already had. The machines connect over Tailscale.
x86_64 builder
x86_64
aarch64 with 8Gb RAM