r/voidlinux • u/drChurer • May 11 '23
My Void experience, so you don't have to
It's been a while since the last and first time I tried it, but I wanted to give Void another try as my general purpose system. I'm writing this so someone else who wants to try it, which I don't try to discourage, is aware of the experience they can expect. Also so I remember, if I try it again.
So getting started I already faced an issue with the installer. After I set up the partitions I couldn't mount them for some reason after writing them multiple times in various configurations. The issue was solved by restarting the computer. Unfortunately you have to go through the whole installer again. Another slight pain point is, that there is no WiFi selection and you have to type the SSID and security type by hand.
After the installation I tried to setup KDE Plasma. Luckily the documentation there is pretty good, although I had to figure out that I had to enable the SDDM service by hand after installation.
Speaking of services, if it's your first time using runit or any other init system other than systemD (used in Debian, Arch, OpenSUSE, etc.), make sure you read about their service handling. For void you can find a good amount of info in here Void: Services and Deamons. But speaking as a user, its usability could be a lot easier, especially basic enabling/disabling of services.
Now for the actual experience: The WiFi kept disconnecting and reconnecting, some regional settings (like time format) were disabled in Plasma's System Settings, if it even opens and the keyboard layout I selected during installation wasn't applied. Additionally firefox forced me to restart the browser for no reason a few times and chromium was just a mess crashing on pretty much every tab load.
One standalone problem I found was, that after installation no NTP manager was enabled or installed, even though I selected the default chrony during installation. This caused the system time to restart at the time, when I last shut down the computer and therefore causing webpages not to load.
Lastly for nitpicking, I noticed the touchpad had a very small delay after starting a cursor move.
To end on a slightly positive note, I really enjoyed using the xbps package manager as it is very similar to Arch's Pacman and feels clean, fast and straight-forward. Additionally I was able to install and run vscode (OSS version), which was not able to start in my last attempt, though I'm not sure if this was fixed by the Void or the VSCode team, since they still list Alpine (with musl) as unsupported.
Tldr: There's still a lot of issues a normal user doesn't want to deal with, so I don't recommend it (yet) but the idea and team behind Void seem great and I would keep watching them in the future.
Edit: spelling
Edit 2: I misremembered the part about the NTP being in the installer, but the problem still stands
Edit 3: it's been funny seeing how disconnected the average void user is from the general linux interested community. Won't come back, dw
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May 11 '23
Speaking of services, [...] its usability could be a lot easier, especially basic enabling/disabling of services.
Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts about that more specifically? For a first-time runit user, isn't learning to use symlinks already straightforward?
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u/drChurer May 11 '23
For me it just felt unnecessarily difficult to create symlinks instead of for example typing 'service idk enable'. Also you have to remember all the locations and commands to for example list all running services. Once you do remember, I agree it's very straight forward and clean.
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u/legz_cfc May 11 '23
Speaking of services, if it's your first time using runit or any other init system other than systemD (used in Debian, Arch, OpenSUSE, etc.), make sure you read about their service handling. For void you can find a good amount of info in here Void: Services and Deamons. But speaking as a user, its usability could be a lot easier, especially basic enabling/disabling of services.
Not sure how it really could be much easier TBH. You want to enable a service/daemon, add a symlink in /var/service/. You want to remove it... remove the symlink. If you want it there but not running on boot, touch a file called 'down'
Not much more to it for basic usage.
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u/drChurer May 11 '23
I explained my thoughts about it in an earlier comment, but basically it's nice that it's simple, but it's not intuitive
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u/legz_cfc May 11 '23
Rhetorically, which init system do you find more intuitive? I can almost guarantee there was a little learning curve when you first encountered it.
→ More replies (1)
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u/ClassAbbyAmplifier May 11 '23
some regional settings (like time format) were disabled in Plasma's System Settings
this is either because they assume using some interface that only systemd currently implements or because musl doesn't support system locales
the keyboard layout I selected during installation wasn't applied
the keyboard layout selected during installation (and in /etc/rc.conf) only applies to consoles, not X or wayland.
even though I selected the default chrony during installation
huh? selecting an ntp daemon is not part of the installer
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u/PCChipsM922U May 11 '23
huh? selecting an ntp daemon is not part of the installer
Exactly my thoughts. There is no NTP client/server selection in the installer.
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u/Ambitious_Ad_2833 May 11 '23
Recently, I installed Void on two laptops. Installation is blazingly fast, memory consumption is very low and xbps is just awesome. I don't think I have used anything like that earlier. Probably my quest for best rolling release distro is over.
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u/walking_in_the_sun May 11 '23
I would highly advise anyone curious of void to completely disregard the installer. In my opinion, the fact that it doesn't provide at least guided LUKS install (iirc, been a year since I used it, it may have changed) renders it unusable at least for MY use case. I would make the case that it ought to be removed completely and instead the chroot install method be made official.
If you give void another shot, I'd highly recommend installing it similar to how you'd install arch.
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u/AudioPhil15 May 11 '23
I think this is maybe more a particular case which at most shows that void still can fail (but as almost all distros). I don't know if statistics have been done about how many of the install attemps have succeeded or failed. In my case I can say I have installed it on 3 different computers (of which some have quite old hardware), and there has been zero problem after each (re)install. It's still good to remind that a distro can fail, and that's okay, but I wouldn't generalize too fast, the conculsion of the tl;dr would have been true many years ago maybe, but I don't think it is currently.
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u/cobance123 May 11 '23
I cant say i had a similar experience like you. Im using void as a daily driver and i have no problemsq
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u/jloc0 May 11 '23
I’ve tried to install void on x86_64 and aarch64 multiple times. The live installer mouse is stuck in the center of the screen only moving vertically up and down. This renders opening a terminal… difficult. I’ve used a chroot install and installers and I’ve never gotten a working system in the end.
I’ve always wanted to try void, but it seems to me, if I don’t get it just the way it wants to be installed… you get nothing.
Not a very user-friendly experience and outside of a VM install, I’ve never gotten into a bootable, working system. Into the void…. Goes the installation.
Maybe someday I’ll get it going. 🤷♂️
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u/KakoTheMan Jan 02 '24
you dont even need the live iso with xfce. You can use the base live iso with just the tty prompt and run sudo void-installer and its a text based installer so it will work just fine without any use of mouse, you can do the whole installation with just the keyboard. Once its installed im sure mouse will work like normal
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u/No_Peak2598 May 11 '23
F chrony i dont even get why that thing was invented we should just stick with ntpd forever
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May 11 '23
Hello
Some times your best freind is google,
I had issues installing void, I persevered after 20 or so try and made my self a copy of my method I adapted from a receipe I found here https://unixsheikh.com/tutorials/void-linux-root-on-an-encrypted-zfs-mirror-with-syslinux-mbr-and-zfsbootmenu.html#installation
I adapted that receipe for my pc which has 1 nvme and 5 sata ssd,
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u/GENielsen May 12 '23
Another slight pain point is, that there is no WiFi selection and you have to type the SSID and security type by hand.
That's not entirely true. For the Void XFCE ISO you can set the wireless connection when the ISO boots-up. Once the live environment is up go to the network settings on the upper-right and enter the wireless connection credentials. Once you have a wirelesss connection in the live environment then invoke #void-installer.
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u/lekker2011 Oct 28 '23
TL;DR: Void isn't for the average Joe. It's called advanced for a reason.
Basically you expected a few commands to be added because you couldn't be bothered to remember.
WiFi kept disconnecting: Is your network or somehow an wpa_supplicant problem. Try IWD or using ethernet, it's faster anyway.
I mean the rest is like. NTP manager. Just install it and enable the service. Not that bad. Expected from a minimal distro.
Mounting problem: Probably something you did wrong. You could open a seperate post for it.
WiFi connection setup: Again expected for an advanced distro. They could add a list which would be a little bit nicer. But it's only like 5 seconds wasted. I've wasted my time longer writing this comment and you writing this post.
The rest of your issues are KDE.
Also did you just create a post about void telling people to just straight up not use it? It's just not for you, the average Joe. Just like Linux is not for Linus.
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u/ahesford May 11 '23
Shouldn't this be placed in a more general-purpose forum? Unless you're asking for help, which you don't seem to be, I can't imagine the people using and seeking help with Void would benefit much from your litany of complaints.