In recent months I have been looking for a semi rolling distro that offers something new. I have wanted to have Flatpak in it and a simple up to date repo that I can ping, and I happen to have been looking for a new DE to play with. Void seems to fill all of these. In fact, it fits them all so well that I have fallen in love with it in a sense. Its the most BSD linux I have ever used. It has a similar package manager, being xbps, to pkg/src in freebsd/openbsd, uses runit, boots pretty quick, and I haven’t used enlightenment since version 16 or 17 so its completely foreign to me all around.
So I’m trying to learn about it. The documentation is slackware level, so not great unless you already just know, and for the most part I am completely lost, which is good! Tonight I plan on putting it on my thinkpad and getting lost.
So. Anything I should know? What do users of Void think of it compared to other distros?
Used it about a year ago for about a month. Really like how runit works, just make a symlink and good to go. But I like screwing around to much with every other thing in the repos and Void doesn’t have a very extensive package list. If it had more packages I would probably be using it instead of Manjaro.
Too lazy to google. But isn’t this that Linux Distro done by some guy in Spain that used to contribute to OpenBSD? I believe they also used to have all of their stuff statically linked at compile time or something. It was something I planned on testing out, but never got around to.
Im use arch on my desktop and void on my laptop. Void is pretty great. Runit is fast. Socklogd is much better than journalctl. The system is very minimal and uses even less ram than a base arch install with i3.
I prefer how voidlinux handles packages over arch even if sizeof(arch repos + aur) > sizeof(voidlinx). I hate having to read PKGBUILDS before installing. Also, the aur is only needed because arch repos are fairly small. Void on the other hand has a larger base repository. Writing a package for xbps is pretty easy (if you’ve done it before). Furthermore, the packaging is much better. For example, there are multiple emacs in the void repos. One comes with the X11 support and another only has the terminal emacs. Similarly, things that are just included in default for arch (ie plugins for an applications) are separate.
However, the killer feature of arch is the documentation. Void is sometimes rough around the edges. I feel like the base of void is much better than arch and void often follows the arch philosophy better than arch itself. It just needs more docs which can be fixed with time.
Looks pretty cool and innovative. I love rolling release distros. I might have a play with this in a VM. I can’t see myself moving away from Antergos any time soon though, the Arch Wiki is very comprehensive.
Well been playing with it on my x201t for a few days and I think I’ll slap it down on my main, Works great on the Thinkpad but my main computer is a lot more complex and if it doesn’t work out I always got my backups that take a massive 26 minutes to restore.
Just got to wait on Steam to backup, because with my internet speeds out here that takes days to re-download…
The more I think about it, goofing off has enabled me to kill more Linux and Windows installs than it has ever really enabled me to accomplish anything of value unless I consider how much I have learned on fixing the things I break while goofing off.
Took about 8 minutes to install and about 10 minutes to figure out that when I installed it and I setup my main user account that the installer didn’t actually add it so I had to set it up manually from the terminal.
Now to figure out why I don’t have tab completion and other stuff in the terminal…
Figured that out easy enough, root is using sh instead of bash…
First thing I would do after installing it would be to edit /etc/passwd and switch root to using /bin/bash instead /bin/sh that and the install I have only has vi installed so got to wait until I’ve updated to add something I’m used to like nano or emacs. I haven’t been using sh or vi for around 10 years now so it’s a bit inconvient for me…
When I was trying it out on my laptop I was doing everything from inside emacs so I didn’t notice a few things.
j down (think downward arrow)
k up
l right
h left
x is delete char - handy for vi
i is insert (like I want to start typing here - so basically for a newb just j,k,l,h your way to your spot and “i” to start typing. )
Esc is "move around mode/command mode)
:q! Is for I’m not sure what I did and don’t want to fuck up this file or, that was nice to look at nothing to change here
:w quick save
:wq save and get me the fuck out of here
Everything else is just showing off
Ps no disrespect. Sounds like you’ve been in the game a long time.
Yeah I tried, but when I was trying to edit /etc/passwd it was doing odd things. I went to go into insert mode and it put an i, so I hit Del and got rid of the I and typed ba in font of the sh and bot biA, exited insert mode and went back into insert mode and tried it again and b moved me to the right and then b did nothing. That was confusing. Going to have to make sure something else isn’t messed up in the install.
Got root switched over to bash now but I got a good laugh off of trying to use vi.
its a mostly fp based distro now, which I adore.