Not quite sure where to place this but I’ve read up on Void Linux a bit the last week or so (after having been curious for quite a while). But, while I know about the big differences when it comes to Void vs EOS I’d love to hear some experiences.
The things I’m most interested in are:
Apps, is there a big difference in the amount of apps available? AUR is awsome with it’s huge amount of apps.
Stability - is there a big difference in stability. Void touts itself as rolling but with a stable focus rather than Archs bleeding edge.
Ease of use/troubleshooting - If something goes wrong on EOS I know I have the arch wiki and most importantly this forum () where I can ask my stupid questions and get help.
Community - I love the EOS community. So many helpful and patient people here. Does Void have a similar community? I doubt it but still, experiences?
They both have a huge selection but the selection of the repos + AUR has many more applications that I needed than the void equivalents. Arch has a substantially larger user base that supports the AUR.
It has been a while since I used it but my memory was that the biggest improvement over pacman was how dependencies were handled. Especially around things like library versions.
Generally the Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki’s, as well as most of the Internet, generally applies to other Linux distros. Obvious differences on init/services though.
Void has a subreddit with a deep history. There are outposts on telegram and matrix but thin.
Best advice would be to do some research, and perhaps try it out in a VM or on hardware for a while. There are many void reviews and youtubes you can check out.
During the spring and for a few months I checked it out. During that time XFCE was the only D.E. it supported, and it had a text-mode installer that looked like that of Slackware. It was a bit confusing to get out of the screen where the user chooses the “main” partition and which file system it should get.
First of all I chose “musl” version because I was curious about it. But my bad habits out of Windoze compelled me to want Wine on that installation. Discovered with a lot of dismay that Wine could be had in 64-bit only, and no Windows installers worked. It was depressing. I wanted to go further but my idea of enjoying Linux isn’t only to go browsing the web, looking at photos and writing simple computer programs.
So I tried a second time with “glibc”. It was OK but requires manual intervention sometimes. I forgot what I had to do to put a volume icon on the taskbar, probably install “pavucontrol”? Nothing to complain about Wine, 32-bit as well as 64-bit, and I was able to run what I think is the most demanding Windoze program although now it’s 11 years old. Previously I couldn’t even use it because is installer had to be executed first.
In the last two times I ran “xbps-install” it finished chugging along which turned me off.
Maybe I’ll try again but I’m not in a hurry. Either Fedora 39 or Void before my Internet subscription runs out.
Yes but the user has to take it upon himself/herself… or it has to be done eg. for GNOME also? Any other D.E. except XFCE? What I know is that my try was during April or May 2022 and they were offering only XFCE in the ISO back then.
LOL enough people dislike “systemd” but you want to put that into a distro that apparently has been doing very well without it. Would Void Linux get better appeal if it allowed “systemd”? I don’t think so. There might be others, away from Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL and Arch families that carry “systemd”. I don’t understand what is the need to put it in on an independent distro that doesn’t.
Another thing. I’m not about running packages only to get one damn D.E. going. Just did that already and was intensely disgusted. Shot myself in the foot, now I’ll never recover. This was for like a couple of dialogs out of GNOME 36, but KDE would be way more involved than that and too much for my patience. So there.
) where I can ask my stupid questions and get help.
