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I think they are saying that in the operating system developer way, where "just works" means coherent and behaving according to some technical specification.

It absolutely does not mean "no manual programming or customization from the user required". It means no dirty hacks, like the ones mainstream distros employ to make some of the customization and programming unnecessary that is actually kind of inherent to the way Unix has traditionally worked.

That may very well be much less easy to work with from a consumer perspective, but from a systems programmer perspective it's the opposite way. Those hacks that allow for the ease of use in a GNU userland make programming a massive pain in the ass where nothing "just works" the way it should, because GNU programs and libraries are in flagrant violation of every specification and rule of thumb that has ever really mattered for Unices.

Also, it's GNU libc that has gone out of its way to fail to adhere to standards, not musl. GNU does not give a single crap about open standards, because they believe that whatever GNU is IS the standard, which apparently is your view as well. That's simply unacceptable for a lot of people.

I'll add that most anti-GNU people I know in the BSD space and related projects are not at all against GNU politically speaking or it's ideals or the free software movement.

We mostly think that a variety of terrible technical decisions have been made and allowed to metastisize over the years, and that they are largely unfixable so long as Linux remains an operating system devoted primarily to ease of use, popularity, and packaged for non-professionals. A lot of this happened rather early on due to the influx of hobbyist programmers from the PC space, and so I think the GNU userland was mostly doomed from the beginning due to the qualifications (or lack thereof) of its programmers when important foundational design choices were made (they are better programmers and more professionally qualified these days, but they aren't about to roll back most of these foundational mistakes because it would collapse the whole thing like a tower of Jenga blocks).

Those goals actually align a lot with the GNU philosophies and so I support the Linux community fully in that way and for making free software available to as many as possible. But technically speaking, GNU userland is a pile of dog shit, and you've really got to rip it out and start from scratch like Chimera is doing as a bare minimum to actually make any kind of progress there.

It shouldn't, and neither should Kali. Neither of those demand the professional level skillsset that BSD and suck less are mostly tailored at. Those communities are composed almost entirely of hobbyists in the OS and systems programming space, or in the case of Kali, not really even strictly an OS project at all and mostly just people repackaging various security related stuff (which is fine of course, there is a legitimate need for some of that, it's just definitively not OS development in the way something like OpenBSD is).

In that sense, both of them are products, not projects, to the vast majority of users, and that influences what the core teams choose to focus on.

I mean yeah, this is transparently a BSD esque project it looks like, as in its pretty clearly tailored specifically to provide the kinds of features professional systems programmers and admins have been clamoring for from Linux for a very long time. Chimera is basically exactly what FreeBSD is but with a Linux kernel (for instance, clang/LLVM as the system compiler and lack of glibc as system libc), I'd imagine there is substantial overlap in our communities. I'll also add that I think these are worthwhile and long overdo technical improvements over the very substandard and strictly worse-than-unix situation in common Linux distros these days. So I support the project, if only to support something that can hopefully prevent Linux from completing its transition into utter shit.

You are spot on about this project I think in your analysis and I think it simply isn't ever going to be something everybody will want to use. That's okay, like you said, some don't want to participate in operating system development, you are mostly looking to be a user. There are plenty of free and open source operating systems that will mostly provide that kind of experience for you. The intent with something like Chimera is probably to dogfood these sorts of improvements so that other more user friendly distributions can use it as an upstream source in the future. So maybe one day we will see a more user friendly version of this.