WARNING: mimicOS is currently in an early bootstraping phase (WIP). Many packages are missing and documentation is non-existent.

What is mimicOS?

What you can find here, is a desktop/workstation Linux-based operating system, targeting developers and power users. It might look familiar on the surface, yet is quite unique in its vision and goals.

Why?

I wanted to scratch my own itch of having something conceptually simple, maintainable by a single person, and following a few unorthodox approaches I was yearning for, that no other distro tried implementing in combination.

How is it special?

Consider a mix of ideas from Gobolinux, sta.li, KISS Linux, Alpine Linux and OpenBSD:

• Simplified non-FHS directory structure
• Statically-linked PIE binaries whenever viable
• Zig as a default C-compiler toolchain
• musl libc by default (Glibc can be used non-intrusively in parallel, as an option)
• Modified KISS package manager
• Preferred permissive licensing
• Rolling release approach
• ... (TODO)

noah's hybrid

How does the directory structure differ?

• every single package is bundled in /pkg
• all binaries are soft-linked into /bin
• manpages, pkgconf and other shared data is soft-linked into /lib
• user profiles live in /usr instead of /home (how dare you?! 😉)

The layout on disk will mostly look like this:

/bin/
 zstd -> ../pkg/zstd-musl/bin/zstd
/dev
/efi
/etc
/lib/
 man/
 man1/
 zstd.1 -> ../../../pkg/zstd-musl/man/man1/zstd.1
 pkgconfig/
 libzstd-musl.pc -> ../../pkg/zstd-musl/lib/pkgconfig/libzstd-musl.pc
 ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
 ld-musl-x86_64.so.1
/mnt
/pkg/
 zstd-musl/
 bin/
 zstd
 include/
 zstd.h
 lib/
 man/
 man1/
 zstd.1
 pkgconfig/
 libzstd-musl.pc
 libzstd.a
 libzstd.so
/proc
/run
/sys
/tmp
/usr/
 <someuser>
/var