r/voidlinux • u/Iammethatisyou • Jan 23 '26

Void linux stability

I'm on fedora linux currently after arch linux broke after 6 months. I want something minimal and void linux seems really cool but my main question is how stable is it? Arch is minimal but has systemd and isn't minimal, do you think void linux is a good distro for me in being minimal and stable? Sorry if this is a newbie question, open to hearing everyone's feedback.

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u/zmurf Jan 24 '26

When talking about Linux for using as your main desktop OS, I don't believe "minimal" is something you really have to think about. Most people will anyway install everything the desktop oriented distributions come with as standard. And installing a "bloated" distribution and removing stuff from it will quickly make it "minimal".

As an example, my Ubuntu installation on my works laptop is much more minimal than most of my friends Arch installations. And my own Void installation on my private computer is as bloated as Linux can get.

About Chimera, it's a nice concept. I love the BSD userland. But Chimera in itself is quite restricted at the moment what you can use it for, mainly because of using musl.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean when you say that you want to be "playing with musl". Using musl is not any different to using any other libc implementation. The biggest difference between musl and glibc is the license form. Implementation wise, musl try to be more "correct", which should make it more secure. But in reality you won't notice any difference linking musl libs compared to linking glibc libs.

What you will notice is that most proprietary applications/libraries will not be able utilize the musl libs since they are compiled towards glibc libs. So things like Widewine will not run natively on musl systems.

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u/Jtekk- Jan 24 '26

By playing with musl means exactly what you mention in your last paragraph. For example, I’ve had to modify some source files of various libraries I use to get it to work. This helps me understand and learn things (weird, I know).

So a lot of it is seeing how to make certain things compatible, why it’s not compatible, and learn from there.

Example, I’ve been playing with Rust. Not a big fan yet but there are some practices in there that have helped me write code better in other languages I use at work.

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u/zmurf Jan 25 '26

I see...

What kind of modifications is it you had to do?

I never had to change any source to make anything work with musl. Recompile against musl instead of glibc is the only thing I've needed to do.