Casuarina offers a Linux system that is compact—yet functional, compatible, customisable, and up-to-date. It’s comprised of modern modular components. It provides a system that a typical power user can understand in depth. It has a supervising, dependency-based init (Dinit) that is not a huge collection of shell scripts, and is also more focused and lighter than systemd.
The package manager is fast and advanced. Packages are easy to add, and are built in an isolated sandbox. All packages published to the repos are built automatically without human involvement.
If you have previous experience with Linux and the command line, and are able to troubleshoot and recover from issues yourself, then sure give it a try. Given the experimental status of the distro you should be prepared to debug issues, and contribute to the development of the system. If you’re expecting a more complete system with everything worked out, a more mainstream distro might be a better choice.
That said, trying it out in a VM is basically free, so that’s a good option.
Chimera should be your first choice. It is the more elegant form of the system, it supports more
more platforms, and is less experimental. However, if you find that you are frequently needing to
run things with compatibility workarounds like Distrobox, or gcompat, or you need to run software
that’s only available for glibc systems, then it might make sense to use Casuarina. Additionally
Casuarina has locale support via glibc, while this is still being worked on in musl.
Casuarina is still young, and Chimera itself is still in beta phase. When preparing the initial port to glibc some corners were cut, such as disabling tests, or marking packages as broken. Addressing these will help make Casuarina less experimental. I’m also open to experimenting with substituting some components when there is a compelling alternative, although none have been identified yet.
Binaries that use libraries available on the system should work. A notable exception is AppImages, which won’t work due to needing an old version of libfuse. There’s currently no plans to address this.
apk packages from other systems such as Chimera or Alpine are not compatible, nor are binaries
compiled on Chimera (unless fully statically linked).
No, Maybe… Who knows. It has more GNU in it than Chimera, but that’s only still only glibc. glibc is built with gcc, but the rest of the system is built with the LLVM toolchain, and the userland originates in FreeBSD. I will continue to not use the GNU/Linux moniker.
Unlikely. These were usually rejected for good reasons.
Not really. Ubuntu’s rushed adoption of them shows that they aren’t really ready for production use due to outstanding performance, security, and compatibility issues. Additionally they would complicate the bootstrap process. See also: So, why use a BSD-based userland anyway?
Yes, but rejected it. It has a much larger scope than doas—aiming to implement most of sudo’s functionality. doas is a lot less complicated coming in at around 3.3k lines of code compared to sudo-rs at 23k, granted some of which is tests.
apkThe name was selected from a several dozen candidates. Casuarina was picked because it starts with C and ends in a, like Chimera. I also wanted the name to have some connection to Australia, where I’m from. Casuarina trees occur in all states and territories of Australia. Finally I wanted something that was not widely used for computing projects already, and had suitable domain names available.
Casuarina was created by Wesley Moore, building upon the extensive work of q66 and Chimera Linux contributors.
No, but I did it anyway. Also my friend gave me a ‘Trust Me I’m An Engineer’ pin, so that helps.
None, it’s a volunteer project. However, I have a pretty good track record keeping things online and working. Also I’ve been using/contributing to Chimera since 2021. Casuarina is my primary OS for work and personal desktop computing since 2026-04-18, so I’m strongly motivated to keep it working.
Like Chimera it uses hardening flags where possible to build software. However it’s not privy to advance disclosure and keeping up with software updates is best effort. So it’s as secure as a very small team can make it.
There is no chat as these tend to be biased toward US/European times zones, and I (wezm) am in almost perfectly out of sync with these in Australia. Also chat tends to be ephemeral, not indexed, nor readily searchable. The forum gives structure to discussions and depends less on immediate replies.
Yes:
aarch64 package building. An Asahi capable Mac
mini might be one option. Keep in mind international shipping to Australia can be quite
expensive, and computers need to be extremely well packaged to help ensure they arrive in one
piece. Email
me if you have something you think might be useful to the project.I wasn’t sure what would be frequently asked when creating the page. Also Q&A lets me use an ampersand, and who doesn’t love a good ampersand.