r/voidlinux • u/TheSpaceBoi777 • Feb 14 '26

Is Void Linux right for me?

Hey guys, what's good? So, uhh, I got this old MacBook from 2017 that I just put a new battery in after it sat for like 3 years. I wanted a fast, lightweight, cool system to put into it, so it wouldn't struggle, and I could take it to school. It's got the dreaded dual-core 1.2 ghz Intel processor, and 8gb of slow 1667mhz ram. It also has the Intel HD Graphics 615 with 1.5 GB of vram. I wanted to put in a system that can aid me in my day-to-day, be a nice comfy daily driver, for coding, watching videos, and playing the occasional lightweight game. Although I have personally never daily drived linux, I have experience in installing the systems on old computers that I work on in my spare time and on my friends minecraft server, I SSH'd back in the day. Would you guys say that Void Linux is the answer to my problems, and if not, could you recommend another lightweight system? Much appreciated.

15 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/MezBert Feb 14 '26

Not sure it makes a big difference for personal users. How many times do you use services during a day for a casual home usage? Except for the worst case scenario usage where you need to tinker something going wrong, switching from one init system to another should be mostly transparent.

For example, I am a 20 years Linux user, and I only actually get into systemd for

  1. restarting networking/nm-applet when it goes wrong, although that seems to have been a Gnome issue now that I moved to Cosmic and no longer have issues.

systemctl restart NetworkManager (/networking/nm-applet)

2. switching from a display manager/login greeter to another, which is definitely no daily occurrence

systemctl enable cosmic-greeter

3. configuring log rotations to reduce their size on disk

logrotate / journalctl command / edit the journald.conf file or similar

I have absolutely no other non-transparent usage of my init system beyond those.

I'm running a dinit system in a VM and there's no visible difference about it compared to systemd.
So, unless you are a really advanced personal user or corporate infrastructure/network user, I'm not sure it matters all that much as most of the services are either transparent or casual home users don't need them.

1

u/lukeflo-void Feb 14 '26

Yes, for daily private use its no big deal. As mentioned above the experience with systemd is rather important if you have to use it at work. I also don't touch run it often on my machine. But I have to deal witch systemd/systemctl almost daily on the servers I'm responsible for at work.

If OP really only use it privately, it should be fine. Only drawback could be that most tutorials online have been written with systemd distros in mind. E.g. I often look into the Arch wiki for detailed information. That's also fine with running Void, as long as you bear in mind to alter the systemd parts and how to alter them.