This community seems a little, uh, inactive, so here’s my shot at stirring up some discussion.
Me, I’m mostly a debian user. Stable for many, many years, but have been using debian sid recently on laptops without any issue.
This community seems a little, uh, inactive, so here’s my shot at stirring up some discussion.
Me, I’m mostly a debian user. Stable for many, many years, but have been using debian sid recently on laptops without any issue.
QI have been using it for over six years now. The only other distro I have experience with is Ubuntu which I use at work and Ubuntu has been becoming somewhat crappy with the heavy emphasis on snap.
I like the package manager. It’s easy to submit updates to outdated packages by filing a PR in the void-packages repo. It strikes a good balance between the numver of packages that are available vs. moderation (as in how AUR is not really moderated and has a kind of anything goes situation). One of the two bad things about packages situation is that the distro is run by a relatively small team of volunteers and the resources available to them are limited. This causes issues like forks of Chrome amd Firefox not being allowed in the official repositories because they take a very long time to compile and with the limited number of build machines available to them, they would block other packages being built. The other bad thing is subjective. It is a good thing for a bunch of other people. Paclages have to compile against both glibc and musl and have to compile successfully for a variety of architectures (x86_64, x86, aarches, arms, ppcs etc.) so sometimes, packages require patches for musl or these special architectures. But very few people have the expertise to find or write these patches so it becomes difficult to submit new packages or upgrade existing ones.
Finding support for Void is a bit difficult. They had a discourse forum a while back which was very lively. But it ended up dying because the hoster kinda just stopped hosting it. The distro maintainers don’t want to start it again because they don’t want to spend time moderating it. So your only options are the subreddit and the IRC channel.
It uses runit instead of systemd. It is not as featureful as systemd but the architecture is much simpler and transparent so it is easier to configure. It also boots much faster than systemd which I like.
Overall I don’t mind it. If I had to move to a different, I would move to Arch Linux but any issues I have run into, I have been able to find solutions or workarounds for them. So I have been sticking to Void.