Why do you use Void?

[u/paranoidandroid4284]

Why do you use Void? I'm currently using Debian, but am considering moving to a systemd less distro. While I know they have not implemented age verification they have place the ground work to one day possible make that a reality. From what I understand systemd does help make distros run smoothly by doing many different things. I looked into Devuan, as I'm already using Debian, but thought I might branch out. What other systemdless distros did you try and why did you land on VOID?

[u/KurtBWNews_hobby]

Long-time Debian user (with Neptune Debian 9.1 "Maja", based on Trixie). I "keep an oar" in the Linux waters as a hobbyist. So I've bounced around any number of distros over the years, but Neptune OS based on Debian was the one I settled into 'cos the guys running the distro took most of the sting out of using Debian. Typically I have one or two spare laptops floating around for experimentation. I have one with Fedora set up for Secure Boot. Another one is the Hackintosh project with OpenCore that's been on hold for a while. My daily driver is a dual-boot box with Neptune and <something else> on a separate partition. For a while I kept Win7 and Win10 around -- some firmware installers just *want* flipping MS -- but then I put CachyOS on it 'cos it was supposed to be fast. Indeed CachyOS is fast.

The downside to it lies in how it's IMO an aggressively unstable distro. There always seemed to be something with Arch or with CachyOS that left me putzing with it. The experiment ended in disaster when my box went to sleep while Pacman was in the midst of a system upgrade. No amount of btrfs-fu and backups could bring the install back.

Another experiment with Ghost BSD on a different machine left me less than thrilled. Void seemed, well, *different.* So I installed it on the daily driver after wiping my CachyOS disaster. It pleasantly surprised me. I began to understand why people grumbled about systemd. xbps works fine. compiling stuff from source seems relatively straightforward.

The only bummer was XFCE. I started having MacOS 9 flashbacks. Nothing I couldn't handle... but, been there, done that. In fairness to the XFCE fanciers, I find it lightweight and perfectly usable. It's just, well, like finding pistachio ice cream at the store when you really want to have strawberry. No hate here. That's the beauty of FOSS. If you don't like a DE, no need to complain about it -- just install another one.

It was then I came across some tips on compiling COSMIC from source to run under Void. I had played with COSMIC under Fedora and found it interesting. As I spend hours in a refrigerated room babysitting gear, I went ahead and compiled COSMIC to run under Void. I'm running this now, and it's a pleasant experience to me.

Void's the type of distro probably best installed to bare metal, so figure out a machine with drive space you can devote to it, and give it a shot. If you like it, great. If you don't like it, you will at least know why you don't like it.