I currently use Manjaro as my daily driver, but it is bloatware to be honest. I want to switch to more minimalist distro so i ended up thinking on Void. So any advice? How is package manager? Community? Softwares? Documentation?
I’ve used it as a daily driver for a few years now. Here are my thoughts on it:
Stability: Generally speaking, I’ve found it to be pretty rock solid for a rolling release distro. Over the years, it’s only really broken a handful of times. Things that break tend to be the same as with any rolling release distro, e.g. pipewire came out which had no immediate impact on pulse, but over time more and more things started to require pipewire, so eventually forcing ones hand with switching.
Updates Being rolling release, everything is relatively up-to-date. The way they manage dependencies package updates with continuous integration is pretty clever and seems to help prevent things from breaking.
System Management Because of the decision to use runit, things are different from mainstream Linux distros. This isn’t bad, just keep in mind you will need to learn to use a new set of tools to manage your system. There are some bits and pieces that bridge the gap, e.g. elogind means you get systemd type session management without needing all of systemd. For system logging, you will need to use socklog instead, which is a very different beast to systemd journal and classic syslogd. For everything else, the arch wiki is very useful for finding light weight utilities to help manage things.
Package availability There are definitely a plethora of options for packages. Because of how their package infrastructure works, it is rare that a package you want isn’t available. And for those that aren’t available, it’s usually a small utility…one with an alternative that is available in the repository already.
User Contributions In void, there is no distinction between “official” and “user” contributed packages. Voids package infrastructure feels more like the AUR from the outset, but with github CI doing the heavy lifting of compiling the package for everyone once you’ve upstreamed package changes. The downside I’ve found is that the maintainers seem to be perpetually time/resource constrained. For any package changes that are moderately more complicated than “uprev package”, “fix breakages” or “new package”, I’ve found it a bit frustrating. A few years ago, I attempted to get some changes in for GHDL to enable backtraceing support, but after a few review comments, it just went silent on the maintainer side, so never got merged. After about a month of silence, github automatically closed the issue.
Documentation Their docs are pretty good for getting started. I’ve found them great for pointing out nuances and peculiarities of Void. It is definitely not as exhaustive and comprehensive as the arch wiki, but about 75-80% of the arch wiki is applicable across the board for all Linux distros anyway…
Totally agree with you.
I currently use Manjaro as my daily driver, but it is bloatware to be honest. I want to switch to more minimalist distro so i ended up thinking on Void.
Why not switch to Arch? It’s basically Manjaro but less shit.
I want to get away from systemd. I tried artix linux for a while but being multi init system, makes it complicate for setting packages for every inits system. I think void will be best exp for me.
I want to get away from systemd
Why?
Thats because its bloatware, and i just need a init system for start my pc, also its dictated by Redhat. Same reason for i hate Ubuntu because Cannonical behind it, and behind of systemd is Redhat.They bind rest projects to themselves.(gnome has dependency to systemd) We shouldnt let Companies to be game keeper in Foss world. Thats my opinion.
The entire Linux kernel is constantly contributed to by companies. So I guess you should hate Linux then.
being contributing and being developing by are two different things.They contributing because they use it on their own server.Linux has dominated server world so its understandable.
They do develop Linux. Not just financial contribution
So any advice?
The Documentation/Book on the website is super useful for people new to void. (The software recommendations below are all included there too) The new grub should be able to decrypt luks2, so the “full disk” encryption guide is outdated. (I didn’t try it out though, if I had, I’d also updated the guide) You probably don’t want the musl version for a Desktop system since it breaks in subtle ways, for a (simple) server it’s feasible imo.
How is package manager?
Fast.
Softwares?
Connman is easier (simpler) than network manager. Metalog lets you easily sort syslog by perl-regex. (Can be used to build alerting scripts) Elogind if you need logind replacement.
Thank you for your info^^
try out void. but arch is a totally fine distro.
if you dont want to hassle with installing go with the autoscript or endeavour os. EOS outcompetes manjaro everywhere.
Can’t get enough of Void.
I install it using this method on my laptop but I go for glibc over musl. Post install I setup sway, PipeWire and what not and have a good time.
Package manager rocks, I don’t think I miss anything from the repos.
Awesome community around the distro. The fact that they have official documentation is great.
I don’t do anything productive on my machine. Procrastination all the way <3
What is differences between musl and glibc? Do i miss something if i go musl over glibc?
GlibC is more ‘boated’ but will give you more support for applications than musl. For example, you can’t run appimages with GlibC. There isn’t much of a difference though. I personally use musl with no problems.
Oh thanks for info, ill go for glibc for desktop then.
How come I run appimages with glibc then? ;)
Oh shit, I meant to say that you can’t run appimages with Musl.
This was some years ago but I used Void as my only OS for almost a year. It was amazing. I manage to customize an i3wm environment, everything was minimalistic, and everyone who looked at my laptop screen said to me “Wow, that looks like ur hacking the NASA”
The package manager was ok. And everything runs smoothly. I miss that old times, right now i can’t spend that much time on customization.
Thanks for sharing your exp. I decided to move to Void. It will take time to figure out but anyway ill get along with it.
Ur welcome. I hope it goes well for you.
I use it on my work PC and on VPSes. You can deeply understand the boot process in just few hours of reading the man pages, scripts and even the source code of runit (there is not much of it!) which is very empowering for an advanced user/admin. XBPS is very fast and lean, making your own packages is easy and the templates for that are clean, the process is well documented. Updates are safe to run and having it rolling means that you can avoid doing large migrations; software is fresh and security updates are prompt. People on IRC are helpful and nice. For documentation the basics are on the website, everything else is already documented on Gentoo and Arch wikis anyway. So if you have some skills and want to be in control of your own computing experience there is no better distro than Void Linux IMHO.
Oh, thank you for sharing your experiement, my most fear is to break my system after updates.
I use it as my primary home machine, running bspwm. I enjoy it, and find once configured it just works. Primarily web browsing, Kicad and OpenSCAD, and some Python development.
I use Void on my laptop (Thinkpad T420) and I am mostly enjoying it so far. The package manager is pretty nice and quick though can be annoying at first having to use seperate programs to install, search, and remove packages though using vpm has made that easier. Using Runit instead of SystemD is weird at first but nice in the end as it’s a lot simpler. Overall I mostly enjoy it and may use it on my desktop if my Arch partition dies.
May I suggest to read https://docs.voidlinux.org/xbps/index.html instead? vpm is a nice wrapper and all, but I highly suggest to get familiar with xbps before using a wrapper to understand how it works and why.
Thank you :)
If you want non-bloated distro with the similarity of Arch-based, I recommend EndeavourOS. It’s pretty close to vanilla Arch.
This is the way.
I’m in the same boat. For a long time I was a RHEL admin at work, and ran Ubuntu at home. Three years ago my workplace switched to Ubuntu servers, and at home I switched to Manjaro. Now I’m sick of Manjaro, and want to move to something else for home use. I’ve been looking at NixOS and Void, both seem pretty cool in their own way.
Are there community packages like the arch repos? I’ve come to rely on those in Manjaro, like I rely on 3rd party PPAs in Ubuntu.
I’m curious, why are you sick of Manjaro? I’ve been use it for 2 years and it’s been smooth sailing. Genuinely just curious.
No reason, really. I’m not part of the “hate on Manjaro” club.
I got started with Manjaro because I was looking for an Arch-like experience, but with better distro management, curated packages, etc. I’ve had some of my best PC gaming experiences on Manjaro with Lutris and Proton, it is a great Linux gaming distro.The distro managers have definitely let me down more than once, most notably when they wouldn’t ship KDE Plasma 5.25 when it was released citing “stability concerns”, and then doing the same thing with Plasma 5.27. But those issues are behind us, and didn’t affect me too badly (I just needed to wait 6 weeks until the next release to get my updates). I’ve come to realise through my use of Manjaro that I actually always want to use it like Arch. Often things I want to install are not available in the Manjaro repos, but are available on AUR. Then installing from AUR sometimes depends on things that are not in Manjaro repos. It gets messy, and I should just use Arch.
But rather than moving to Arch, I think I am itching to move to something completely different, and NixOS and Void are about as different as it gets.
I use it on my laptop, RPI 3B+ and my VPS.
Good package manager, active community (helpful but you need to do a lot of digging yourself), has a lot of software packaged, the documentation is however quite lacking.
If you know what you do and what you want, Void can be a good distro for you. I can recommend it for advanced users.
Im not newbie. But not pro as well.Ill hang out in virtual box for a while to get know it.
just got into void after having been an arch user for a while and wanted to see if i would miss it. so far, so good. pretty similar experience to arch, but i don’t really do anything other than rice and code. as someone else mentioned, the package manager is sort of weird if you come from pacman, but i’ve got some aliases set up to help me out with that. xbps-install -Su is a mouthfull imo. the point is i’m kinda easy to please. as long as i have my hardened firefox, vim, and a pretty desktop, i’m happy tbh.
i’ve been seeing more and more docs for how to do things with void which leads me to believe there’s some other curious people doing things with it but honestly, arch users are so prevalent i think i’m gonna miss being able to troubleshoot as easily as i was. come enter the void!
Ill definitely try Void soon.
I use it on my laptop too and have used on a desktop comp for a while. I’ve only done it with i3 or lxde as the desktop environment, so don’t know if it has all the ease-of-use features of Xfce, Gnome or KDE work, but it’s worked great for me. I want to keep Xfce Manjaro on my strongest computer, for the widest range of installable programs and things that just work - the bloat is still less and the design better than say Windows or Ubuntu, but for every other computer Void is now my favourite. Xbps does have a wide of software. It works well like another pacman. My void computers boot fast, faster than my strong computer. I worry less that it will one day have a boot error. Runit has a nice clean comandline interface for managing services like systemd and hasn’t fumbled a daemon yet. It makes me wonder what trouble systemd is saving me. Though I usually leave the daemons alone either way. For community and docs, I don’t know so much. I have used the wiki, which worked for me. Just checking now I see they’ve deprecated it in favour of other docs they’re offering. Luke Smith on Youtube got me into void. He has a good intro to xpbs. I haven’t yet had it stop booting because of an update that requires me to reconfigure stuff. TLDR: yes, it’s fast and beatiful and at least pretty stable and useful
Sorry, I have to correct myself:
I have 2 laptops and I used Manjaro with LXDE on the stronger one. I wanted to be ready to collaborate on any open source project and be able install all the required tools, so I went for the Arch-based thing I was most familiar with.
But void and Manjaro work so similarly for me that it’s easy for me to forget.
Thank you for sharing your exp:))
Excellent Package manager.
Small(er) community than what you might be used to since you’re coming from a more mainstream distribution.
Smaller selection of software available than Arch (due to AUR) but I dabble only with essentials so hasn’t bothered me. You can always compile from source.
Good documentation. It’s not at the level of Gentoo or the BSDs but good enough for anyone to get a hold on it and start learning.
No
systemd
