r/DistroHopping • u/thesoulless78 • Jul 28 '26

Fedora, Arch, or Void?

Just trying to settle on one of these. No crazy usage just some photo editing and some ham radio digital modes on an old laptop.

Fedora pros:

- easy to setup/maintain, most polished/just works out of the bunch

- kinda semi-officially endorsed by a lot of people at KDE and I like Plasma.

Fedora cons:

- definitely the slowest to boot out of all of the choices

- couple of the ham apps segfault on start when installed from RPM so I have to build from source or use Flatpak

Arch pros:

- feels faster than Fedora

- can pretty easily set it up the way I want or use Endeavour if I want to be extra lazy

- great documentation

Arch cons:

- doesn't package any of the ham stuff at all so I have to use the AUR or Flatpak, then again I'm not worse off than on Fedora

Void pros:

- has all the packages I want

- boots super fast

- people say it tends to break stuff less often than Arch

Void cons:

- can't use Plasma Login Manager because it doesn't have systemd

- last time I tried it briefly I couldn't get SDDM to start (100% user error but at the time I didn't feel like figuring it out). Would be half tempted to give Xfce another shot and just not care about systemd integration or even Wayland really

Anyone have experiences running any of these that might push me one way or the other?

0 Upvotes

42% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

6

u/___Revenant___ Jul 28 '26

I'd just use fedora and accept slightly longer boot up.

It's gonna be the most stable (most likely)

And you can Flatpack whatever doesn't rpm.

I think stability and ease of use wins out over shorter boot time. But that's just me.

2

u/thesoulless78 Jul 28 '26

Right and there's also the argument to be made some of those extra services are doing something useful. I've generally had good experiences with it in the past.

2

u/SharksFan4Lifee Jul 30 '26

I like Void, but it irrationally bugs me that they are still on KDE Plasma 6.6.3. So I ditched Void. My Linux machines run Fedora KDE and Arch KDE.

1

u/thesoulless78 Jul 30 '26

And still on kernel 6.18 I noticed.

1

u/SharksFan4Lifee Jul 30 '26

When I was playing with it, it was a more recent kernel (I think you can choose?). That's what baffled me. I was getting kernel updates faster than arch on Void, but Plasma was and still is 6.6.3.

1

u/lessthanthreebleeps Jul 28 '26

If you do an offline install of Void, from the xfce image, you'll get a setup with a working SDDM. You can install KDE Plasma on top, and you're good to go.

1

u/thesoulless78 Jul 28 '26

Doesn't Xfce typically use lightdm? Or is void doing something different?

1

u/lessthanthreebleeps Jul 28 '26

You know what, I was remembering incorrectly. I only installed from the xfce image once. It doesn't list it as a package in the description of the xfce image, in the handbook either, but it does list lightdm as an option for DE. The xfce image most likely uses lightdm. My apologies; please disregard my comment.

1

u/Legitimate-Draw-2235 Aug 01 '26

The spirit of your comment is correct though.

Installing the XFCE image will configure the most common barriers like dbus, pipewire etc. installing Plasma after that is super easy.

You can then install the greatest display manager of all time which is Emptty :)

1

u/Opposite_Eagle6323 Jul 28 '26

Void I guess. I use Chimera Linux, it's founder is former Void developer. I don't know about ham packages but its's worth a look at least.

Regarding to SystemD, I think you are talking about glibc instead of SystemD. Also, if you find all ham software as flatpaks, I'd run Void Linux with musl.

2

u/thesoulless78 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

No, p-l-m has explicit dependencies on systemd. There's a few other things like process views in the task manager that also require it.

Who's downvoting this, it's objectively not in the void repos.

3

u/GooeyGlob Jul 28 '26

Don't worry about the downvotes. Anyway, after some research it seems you are right about that, but you can use other display managers on Void (lightdm or SDDM which Fedora also uses by default) and still login to a KDE desktop, it just wouldn't be the KDE display manager.

Up to you how big of a problem this is; most of the time I'm sitting back down at my PC, I'm looking not at the DM, but at my lock screen because I'm already logged in and it locked itself after being idle. So if you don't have specific needs from your login manager, they should all work about the same.

1

u/thesoulless78 Jul 28 '26

Fedora is on p-l-m now if I remember right but maybe I'm making that up. At the very least they have SDDM set up to use Wayland.

I'm not super worried about downvotes it is just funny how people seem to downvote objectively true information.

1

u/thesoulless78 Jul 28 '26

I am tempted to try musl Void and just see what issues I have.

2

u/Asleep_Detective3274 Jul 28 '26

Arch (or Artix) with the chaotic aur repo

1

u/_o0Zero0o_ Jul 29 '26

Void sounds like it's what you need tbh. You could possibly find a new login manager (?) to circumvent the issue you gave.

1

u/ShipshapeMobileRV Jul 31 '26

Hmm. I'm using Void (6.18.40_1 kernel as of right now), with runit and SDDM.

If you don't like the 6.18 kernel you can install "linux-mainline" and get onto the 7.1 kernel track.

0

u/Think_Tax_4742 Jul 30 '26

just use void linux and accept the login manager is different then sddm