dani77 announces Hybrid-d77

dani77 announces Hybrid-d77

Contents

• What is Hybrid-d77?

• Under the bonnet: the patched installer and build

• A hands-on look

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What is Hybrid-d77?

If you have spent any time in the Linux and BSD corners of the internet, you will know that most distributions pick a side. You are either a Linux kernel with a Linux userland, or a BSD kernel with a BSD userland, and the two worlds rarely mix. Chimera Linux quietly broke that rule by pairing a Linux kernel with a BSD userland, borrowing FreeBSD's own chimerautils for its everyday command-line tools, and packaging everything with apk. That is the same package format used by Alpine Linux, though built through Chimera's own, entirely separate cports/cbuild system rather than Alpine's tools.

Hybrid-d77 takes that already unusual foundation and builds a genuinely usable desktop on top of it. It is the newest project from Daniel, an open-source enthusiast and pharmacist who goes by dani77 online, and who has spent years tinkering with minimal Linux setups, Coreboot firmware and old hardware revivals. His name should ring a bell if you have come across d77void, his earlier respin of Void Linux, which offers a whole menu of window managers and desktop environments to choose from.

Hybrid-d77 takes a rather different approach. Rather than offering a buffet of desktop choices, it commits to one clean combination: the Sway tiling Wayland compositor paired with the Waybar status bar, and dinit rather than systemd or runit running the show underneath. The name itself is a deliberate choice too. Unlike d77void, which stays tied to Void's own name, Hybrid-d77 was named without the word "Chimera" in it on purpose, partly out of respect for trademark conventions around the base project's name, and partly to give the respin its own identity.

The Waybar setup did not appear out of nowhere either. According to the project's own notes, an earlier attempt used a different status bar called yambar, but that approach was dropped once real bugs turned up during actual use on hardware, including a hardcoded battery name, an unreliable refresh rate, and a wireless network indicator that would vanish entirely. Waybar, ported across from an already working Sway configuration, replaced it.

One detail that seasoned Void Linux users will find familiar is the login experience. There is no graphical login screen or display manager here, even though the underlying greetd greeter software is available if you wanted it. Instead, Hybrid-d77 follows the same convention as both Void and Chimera themselves: you are greeted with a plain text login: prompt, a message of the day documenting the available credentials, and then it drops you straight into a working Sway session once you log in and it reads your shell profile. The default accounts are anon and root, both using the password chimera, mirroring the same pattern d77void uses with its own anon/voidlinux combination.

At the time of writing, there is no numbered version release to point to. Hybrid-d77 is described on its own SourceForge page as a proof-of-concept demonstrating what Chimera Linux's own tooling, such as chimera-live and chimera-install-scripts, can do, together with the cports package collection. That does not mean it is fragile or half-finished, though. The project's own status notes state plainly that it has been confirmed working end to end on real physical hardware, not merely inside a virtual machine, including the more delicate parts of the process such as destructive disk partitioning during installation.

You can download the live image directly from SourceForge, where the project is proudly hosted, while the underlying h77-* packages that make up the distinctive parts of Hybrid-d77 are built and published separately as GitHub Releases. The full source, including the build scripts and documentation, sits in a public GitHub repository. Worth noting too: Hybrid-d77 is an independent respin and is not affiliated with the official Chimera Linux project in any way.

Under the bonnet: the patched installer and build

Chimera Linux already ships with its own text-based installer, but Hybrid-d77 does not simply reuse it unmodified. Daniel has patched it fairly extensively, adding several steps that do not exist in the stock version at all. Chief among these are proper interactive checklists for choosing user groups and which services should be enabled at boot, something the original installer leaves out entirely. Disk partitioning and filesystem planning have also been reworked, splitting the process into an interactive planning stage followed by a single, non-interactive pass that actually formats and mounts everything. Network configuration, handled through the familiar nmtui text interface, and console keymap selection round out the additions.

That filesystem-planning approach was not invented from scratch. The project's own documentation credits Void Linux's installer architecture as the direct inspiration, specifically the way it separates planning your disk layout from actually executing it, a division that proved sturdy enough on real hardware to be worth borrowing wholesale. A couple of genuine bugs in the upstream Chimera installer were also found and fixed along the way, including one option that broke the terminal's screen redraw and another that silently discarded local patches every time it checked for updates.

Building Hybrid-d77 from source involves two separate stages, each running in its own container. The first stage uses Chimera's own cbuild tool, the same package-building system that plays a role roughly equivalent to Void's xbps-src, to compile the project's custom packages into proper .apk files. These custom packages include things like h77-dots, which carries general application configuration files for tools such as the foot terminal, and h77-sway-dots, which carries the Sway, Waybar and lock-screen configuration specifically. The second stage takes those freshly built packages and feeds them into Chimera's own live-image builder to produce the final bootable ISO. For anyone who does not fancy building everything locally, GitHub Actions handles this automatically, compiling the packages in the cloud and publishing them as downloadable release assets that the ISO-building script can simply fetch instead.

On the licensing side, Daniel's own original contributions to the project, covering the custom packages, container definitions, ISO-building scripts and documentation, are released under the permissive MIT licence. The larger chunks of code borrowed and patched from upstream Chimera projects keep their original licensing terms intact: the live-image tooling remains under the GNU General Public License version 3, while the installer scripts remain under the two-clause BSD licence.

A hands-on look

Screenshots from a recent test installation inside VirtualBox, running on a Windows 11 host, give a good sense of what actually greets you when you try Hybrid-d77 for yourself.

The live image boots through the Limine boot manager, offering a choice between a normal boot and a RAM-loaded version of the same Chimera Linux build. Underneath, you can watch dinit bringing up each service in turn, from early filesystem checks through to NetworkManager, the time-syncing chronyd, polkitd for permissions, and elogind for session management, each one reported as it starts.

Once booted, the login screen spells out both sets of default credentials plainly, alongside a short reminder that installing to disk is as simple as running doas h77-installer, and that there is genuinely nothing to prepare by hand beforehand since partitioning and formatting both happen inside the installer itself.

Running that command as the anon user, after supplying the account's doas password, opens a text-based menu that walks through every stage of setting up the system: choosing between a local or network install source, configuring networking, picking an apk mirror from a handful of options spread across Europe, Australia and Asia, setting a hostname, choosing a timezone through a simple region-then-city picker, selecting a console keymap, setting the root password, and creating a personal user account complete with a full name and group memberships such as wheel and audio ticked by default.

Partitioning uses the well-established cfdisk tool, and in the walkthrough this produced three partitions: a small EFI system partition, a large one for the root filesystem, and a swap partition. The installer then asks, partition by partition, which filesystem to format each one with, offering FAT32 for the EFI partition, a choice of Linux filesystems including ext4 and Btrfs for the root partition, and a dedicated swap option, always spelling out clearly which choices will erase existing data and which will not. From there, choosing a kernel, whether Chimera's latest stable build or the longer-term support alternative, adding any extra software packages, and picking a bootloader, with GRUB, systemd-boot or none of the above all on offer, complete the configuration before the actual installation begins.

Installation itself is refreshingly transparent to watch. The system is copied across, the local package index is refreshed against the chosen mirror, any extra requested packages are pulled in, the boot image is regenerated, and the chosen bootloader is installed and configured with proper boot menu entries. A final checklist lets you confirm which background services should start automatically, before offering an optional shell for any last manual tweaks and then a straightforward prompt to reboot.

On that first reboot, GRUB presents a tidy menu with the main Chimera Linux entry, an advanced options submenu, and direct access to UEFI firmware settings, before dinit once again works through its startup sequence and lands you at a text login prompt for the freshly installed system. Logging in with the newly created account this time drops you straight into a working Sway desktop, complete with the Waybar status bar along the top showing temperature, volume, microphone status, network address, memory and disk usage, and a power menu icon, all set against a dark wallpaper carrying the project's own triangular D77 logo as a subtle watermark.

Running a system information tool called fastfetch on this now-installed system confirms the details plainly: Chimera Linux running a recent kernel, Sway 1.12 on Wayland, just over 1,250 apk packages installed, and a healthy amount of free disk space remaining. Checking the init system directly confirms dinit is indeed the one in charge rather than systemd. A quick look with htop shows a lean set of background processes, exactly what you would expect from a minimal, carefully assembled desktop rather than a heavyweight distribution.

Sway itself is helpful about revealing its own default shortcuts along the way, with on-screen hints demonstrating that pressing the Super key together with "d" opens an application launcher, Super and Shift together with "q" prompts for confirmation before closing the Wayland session entirely, and Super together with "x" brings up a simple session menu offering suspend, logout, reboot and shutdown options. From that desktop, everyday applications such as the Firefox web browser and the Thunar file manager both launch without any fuss, with Thunar showing a completely standard home folder layout ready for use.

A final word

Hybrid-d77 is a genuinely interesting corner of the open-source world: a small, personal project that takes an already ambitious base distribution and shapes it into something practical, tested and clearly cared for. It will not be for everyone, since it assumes a degree of comfort with text-based installers and tiling window managers, but for anyone curious about what a Linux kernel and a BSD userland look like when they share the same desktop, it is well worth a look.

Disclaimer: All product names, logos, trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned in this article, including Chimera Linux, Void Linux, Sway, Waybar, dinit and any related marks, are the property of their respective owners and are used here for identification and informational purposes only. The Distrowrite Project has made every reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information presented, drawing solely from the official sources listed below, but readers are encouraged to consult those sources directly for the most current details before downloading, installing or deploying any software mentioned. As always, please use open-source software responsibly and in accordance with its applicable licence terms.

References

• Hybrid-d77 official project page

• Hybrid-d77 latest download (SourceForge)

• Hybrid-d77 packages releases (GitHub)

• Hybrid-d77 source repository (GitHub)

• dani77's personal page

• Sway Cheatsheet

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