I installed Void on my current laptop on the 10th of December 2021, and there has never been any reinstall.
The distro is absurdly stable. It’s a rolling release, and yet, the worst update I had in those years was one time, GTK 4 apps took a little longer to open on GNOME. Which was reverted after a few hours. Not only that, I sometimes spent months without any update, and yet, whenever I did update, absolutely nothing went wrong. Granted, I pretty much only did full upgrades, and never partial upgrades, which generally help a lot. Still.
↫ Sarah Mathey
Void is love, Void is life. It’s such an absurdly good distribution, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I prefer Fedora KDE by a hair, I’d be using Void on all of my machines. The only reason I’m not is that I would set up Void very close to what I get from Fedora KDE out of the box anyway, so my laziness gets the better of me there. I used to run Void on my POWER9 hardware, but that architecture is no longer supported by Void.
If you’re looking for a Linux distribution free of systemd, there’s little out there that can equal or top Void, and even if you don’t care much about init systems, Void still has a lot to offer. The documentation is decent, its package manager is a joy to use, the repositories are loaded and up-to-date, and it strikes a great balance between building an entire Linux system from scratch on the one hand, and complete desktop distributions like Fedora on the other. The best way I can describe it is that Void feels like the most BSD-y of Linux distributions.
Void is my fallback, in case Fedora for whatever reason slips up and dies. IBM, Red Hat, “AI” – there’s a lot of pits Fedora can fall into, after all.
Void is the best distro i have ever used. It uses runit so it boot a LOT faster than systemd, it has no poettingware installed by default so sound works pefectly over hdmi and 3.5mm. An overall amazing distro, and i agree with the poster, no reinstall for years.
“Void is love, Void is life. It’s such an absurdly good distribution, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I prefer Fedora KDE by a hair, I’d be using Void on all of my machines. The only reason I’m not is that I would set up Void very close to what I get from Fedora KDE out of the box anyway, so my laziness gets the better of me there. I used to run Void on my POWER9 hardware, but that architecture is no longer supported by Void.”
Void is indeed excellent. That said, if you want KDE on POWER9, maybe check out Chimera Linux. It was founded by the dev that previously brought PPC to Void Linux and the two distros have a lot in common. I have been running Chimera with KDE and it has been totally rock solid despite only being in beta. It was founded by dev that previously brought PPC to Void Linux and the two distros have a lot in common. Chimera Linux started as a rewrite of the Void source packaging system but the rewrite spilled over to the entire distro. I fear Chimera is the reason that POWER9 is no longer supported by Void.
I have been running Chimera with KDE and it has been totally rock solid despite only being in beta (on x86-64). It is my favourite distro though it is certainly still young in terms of specialty hardware support and repository size. I use and Arch Distrobox to close the gap. If I had not found Chimera Linux though, Void would be high on my list.
Thom, I believe that you know all this as I recall you mentioning Chimera Linux and POWER9. I just could not read that paragraph without responding.
Agreed, Void is impressive. My main desktop Is Linux Mint MATE, but I keep an eye on a number of other distros (in VMs), and Void is one of them. It always strikes me how crazy fast it updates compared to any other option. And indeed, never had any problems updating, and I don’t do it very frequently.
I’d like to love Void, I’ve used a long time as mi first driver, solid as hell, no bloat at all, complete control over everything, but… I had several problems in the past when trying to run some apps which are not packaged by the distro mantainers, even a lot of stability problems with AppImages, which some of them didn’t run at all. There are some pieces of software that a I really need always working, and that’s where I had a lot of headaches, for example CuraSlicer, TeamViewer, several AppImages is I mentioned earlier. I don’t know what’s the problem and don’t have time to spend in forums searching for a solution. This problems NEVER EVER happened to me on Debian or any distribution based on Debian stable. I feel really sorry cause XBPS is gold for me regarding simplicity and stability.
I’ve had zero issues using TeamViewer in Void, I do it practically every day as one of my clients won’t use anything else. I just downloaded the generic Linux tarball provided by TeamViewer, and I launch the executable. It runs perfectly with no distro-specific gotchas.
I do feel your pain though; where is my Pinta for Void? I have to either build it and all of its Mono dependencies myself, or use the Flatpak which feels alien and looks weird. I will say I’ve had better luck with Flatpaks versus AppImages, and Void includes support for Flatpak: https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/external-applications.html#flatpak
Do you use the Glibc or the musl version of Void?
Another option could be Distrobox. I install an Arch Distrobox on every system I use, regardless of distro. Whenever I run into a wrinkle when I am trying to be “productive”, I just pop into the Distrobox. Yesterday, for example, I wanted to install the Microsoft fonts on Chimera Linux. After 2 minutes of searching, I realized it was going to be a pain. So, I installed them in Distrobox from the AUR (yay -S ttf-ms-win11-auto) and then just copied the folder containing the MS fonts over to Chimera. Done in a flash. In cases where I install an app in Distrobox, I might come back later during “playtime” and try to port it to Chimera.
Actually, I install an Arch Distrobox even when on Arch or EOS just to keep my main system tidy. In fact, I often have two where one is just for experimenting and checking things out (mission-center is an example app from yesterday). If I end up with too much junk in my experiment bucket, I can just blow it away without too much consequence. As a result, my workflows and app availability are basically the same no matter what host distro I am working with.
I just booted my old laptop to update Archlinux on it. It was originally installed in August 2014, and the only time I’ve had it turn into an unbootable mess was during the systemd transition, which it did, in the end, survive. I’m not saying this because Archlinux in any way is absurdly stable — it’s quite the opposite (hence booting it once in a while just to run updates) — but because I find the idea that no reinstall in little more than three years = stability to be, well, absurd.
Linux package management these days is generally very good, and things rarely break. This is of course no diss of Void.
I love Arch. It is still what I use the most due to hardware support. However, I am sure that you at least had to jump through a few expired keyring hoops if it had been that long between updates. This is not difficult or dangerous but it does at least require some knowledge of the system to make it work. The expertise required to update a very out-of-date Arch system is one of my biggest complaints about the distro (and distros like EndeavourOS).
That said, I agree with you. I have had the same experience multiple times where I have taken an Arch system that had not been updated in years and been able to quickly bring it completely up to date without incident. In these situations, there are often a few package replacements that have to be accepted or multiple sources of new dependencies that have to be chosen. But it is all presented in a clear manner and it all works flawlessly. If not for having to reboot to use the updated kernel, it would all happen completely in place without any downtime despite many gigabytes of new packages being installed. I have had Arch updates that applied almost 20 gigabytes of software and thousands of packages with a single command.
In Chimera Linux, my early installs have stayed absolutely rock solid through many updates despite the fact that the distro is still experiencing big architectural and filesystem layout changes. It just works.
But this is a testament to the package manager and I do not think it is yet universal across all distros. Having to upgrade a Fedora system that has had multiple major releases in the meantime can be quite a bit more arduous and hazardous. And, in my experience and in the stories you hear on the net and on YouTube (eg. LTT), anything apt based can be a minefield when doing huge updates. These systems will sometimes uninstall important packages or subsystems in an effort to find a compatible sub-set of packages to apply with the result that functionality can be lost or even that the system can become inoperable.
So, I think it is still valid to praise Void in this regard. It may not be uniquely robust with regards to updates but it may be markedly superior to the systems that the majority of Linux users are working with today.
I’ve tried Void briefly from time to time in a VM but beyond that I don’t have much experience with it. I don’t think it’s quite what I’m looking for in a desktop system, so obviously I never set it up on my system. But based on my short time with it it feels simple yet advanced in a Slackware way, yet with some Debian-like functionality when it comes to package management and other automation. Overall, certainly not a bad distro for what it’s aiming to be. I tend to just stick with Debian and derivatives, just because it tends to work better and with less trouble when setting up a desktop or laptop machine, but I could easily see Void being set up to do the same things, just maybe with some more work, if someone wanted. I feel like it’d make a rock-solid lightweight server distro..