Chimera is an interesting new Linux distro with no systemd, BSD utils instead of gnu, and other unique design choices.
Reading about it on lobste.rs, the developer (or one of them) commented:
"
why does every other linux distribution exist? most of them provide far less added value compared to the others, yet nobody questions their existence, perhaps because they are fundamentally uninteresting
it’s always a combination of many smaller factors
i just wanted to make a well-rounded and somewhat opinionated system without cruft or sketchy parts, but still featureful and generally usable (no suckless junk), with a low-maintenance but high-correctness package build system and infrastructure, no systemd but taking service management and everything around it seriously (there are exactly 0 other non-systemd distros that do that), easy to bootstrap, architecture-agnostic, and hardened (as much as possible without introducing visible breakage or significant performance loss; the only “linux distro” that really takes this seriously is android, and that’s not general-purpose)
none of the individual choices like userland base or libc or whatever are goals in themselves, they are a means to an end or just the most obvious thing given the circumstances"