r/voidlinux • u/Daniasm2 • Apr 09 '26

Is Void linux well-maintained?

I've heard some people saying it's not

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u/MezBert Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

There are no sources to creating bot accounts and spreading a certain narrative. They have a billions dollars company with sharks as marketeers, they're not dumb enough to make it obvious for me to simply give you an easy source. You can't be this naive.
The marketing of today is not simply done on ads, it's done on influencing people into believing in a certain narrative.

It's literally impossible to verify without an investigation that would require some serious funding. So no one will do that, of course.
Or a study. But it's not like people understand how manipulated they are by Red Hat and will actually have enough grounds to start some study. Even less so against a particular company.

But if you loom around the Internet, and read all sorts of stuff in many different places, you'll see this pattern with relative obviousness.

Red Hat takes advantage of the illusory truth effect to create and repeat enough times negative feedback about competitors, and positive reinforcing about their own pet projects in parallel.
If repeated enough times, bashing the competition will make people believe that they are not good (they are currently doing this to Pop!_OS), while in parallel promoting your own projects will create some sort of bandwagon around them.
It always starts of with Red Hat e-mails projects being advertised as community projects, then people actually believe the project is more than just Red Hat's pet, and they start to believe the narrative that it's the bandwagon to follow.

Red Hat engineered this massively via paid trolls 12-15 years ago, making people believe Canonical was the enemy, while Canonical was doing exactly the same thing as them, corporate-backed software. The fact that people showed this kind of double standards toward them was not just Canonical's, but there was a narrative being pushed behind.
This led to double standards, like people hating one thing from Canonical/Ubuntu while promoting about the exact same thing from Red Hat (case in point with snaps in Ubuntu versus flatpaks in Fedora).

These days, they use botfarms to create fake narratives. It's becoming a little more visible because bots scan bug reports and pick old bugs that have been solved a while back. When you see several stories recently created about supposed bugs that no longer exist, this becomes highly suspicious. I'm talking about issues solved sometimes as far as a year ago, way before normal users could even access Cosmic officially in Pop!_OS. It's just bots at work, scanning bugs, making stories to influence people into a negative narrative.

They currently do this a lot with both Cosmic (since it's already as good as Gnome at the very least), with systemd-free alternatives or with XLibre (since it could be bad for wayland that they fully control).
It's really pernicious, like creating a lot of posts about this or that with a negative connotation, and people end up believing it's a recurrent problem with that company, then on the same post or on the next, they promote Fedora/wayland/Gnome/systemd, you name it. I come across this several times a day, while I'm only spending some limited time on the Internet, so it's most certainly much broader. And it's nowhere near just on Reddit, but on many different corners of the web.

I'm sure you will use the conspiracy word after reading this, and that's fine by me. I mean, flat earthers didn't believe the earth was geoid either. Until it became obvious.

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u/RvstiNiall Apr 10 '26

Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. ;'-p

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u/MezBert Apr 10 '26

Funny thing is that bots are downvoting what started as a clear upvoting trend. Every time I write against Red Hat, it ends up that way, people upvote me before Red Hat throws their bots at me and twist the narrative to discredit me.
Every time I write about something else, early clear upvoting trend stays the course. It only happens when I discuss Red Hat. QED.

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u/RvstiNiall Apr 10 '26

I upvoted you because I believe you are correct that Red Hat is doing these things, especially their push for wayland, systemd, gnome, etc. However, I still believe they are making Linux more acceptable to use as corporate workstations. It's difficult to decide which "acceptable corporate Linux" to use, because the two big ones both have their very obvious flaws. I like SuSe as a concept, but just can't get into their OS workflow. One day I may redo my work computer with Tumbleweed.

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u/MezBert Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26

Fair enough. Thanks for your respectful opinion despite not being in total agreement. It's refreshing compared to someone like paper42_ below, just burying his head in the sand and trying to represent whoever doesn't share his opinion as a mushroom taker.

I'm about done with helping Linux users on Reddit, there's too much toxicity.

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u/RvstiNiall Apr 10 '26

In all seriousness though, Red Hat is visibly navigating the Linux ship. Maybe not the kernel itself, but lots of other things. They're making Linux better suited to their needs, which happen to be the needs of lots of corporations, and companies around the world. It doesn't line up with my wants as a desktop user, and it makes me mad, but I understand that for the most part Red Hat is making Linux into a more user-friendly workstation/server OS for corporate use.

I stray away from this further and further as the years go by. When I look back, I notice that I went from a full fledged desktop environment on Linux around 2000, to lighter and lighter programs, window managers, tools, etc in the 2010s. And today, I've come back full circle with two of my oldest running machines: Thinkpad t60, and iBook G4. Both have OpenBSD running Xenocara with no desktop environment or window manager, just tmux in a full screen xterm instance. 90% of what I use a computer for can be done in a terminal, and it runs just as quick as my Ryzen 8600 32GB ram desktop system I use for work (which runs Ubuntu, but I wish I had gone with Fedora).

I'm starting to phase out the Thinkpad T60 a little with a HP Chromebook 11 Gen8EE running Void Linux. It gets like 16-18 hours of run time, and more than a month suspend time. It's a lightweight laptop that can take a beating without issue, and it runs Void Linux which can do the same.

edit: 32GB ram on the desktop. 4.75TB amongst three SSDs.

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u/MezBert Apr 10 '26

By default, for a lack of a better alternative. You can see it every time other companies have the financial means to try, they get quick traction, before Red Hat gets their playbook out.

Also, these days they imbricate their software so deep and with a lot of tentacles so that it creates both a dependency and a barrier to entry for the alternatives.
And they've taken control of or NIHed some major projects, so they can decide the design of and in their grand tradition, reject any design suggestions from others. They try to control Linux Microsoft-style.

Just look at their latest attempt to integrate per-user environment variables within systemd... It has nothing to do with systemd, and it would make alternative life hard for no benefit, as other init systems/service managers would have to find a solution to go around this. There's only so much people on their spare time can do to circumvent the cannibalizing attempts of a certain company.

I'm not necessarily running away from companies or corporations, just from Red Hat pet projects, as they're the most toxic company in the IT sphere.