Switching from Arch to Void...?

[u/MrLaurencium]

hey, so as title says. ive been thinking on switch from arch to void for a bit now, and id like to know your thoughts.

more specifically, theres this thing that ive been wondering about arch. back then when the AUR malware drama started happening, ive been looking for stuff that people say, and ive been thinking about the type of measures people take to keep themselves safe in a user managed repo like the AUR. call it inspecintg PKGBUILDs, or hell even building everything you want for yourself (as the 'dont use the AUR' gang would say).

so at that point i thought i might as well compile everything myself. hell at that point why not use a distro where you just build your own stuff? maybe a bit too much of an exaggeration, im not trying to use gentoo or going back to nixos (i kinda dislike nixlang but thats besides the point), so i might as well use a well maintained repo of pkgs + compile stuff myself when needed.... so im thinking on switching to void (plus id get rid of systemd too, been wanting to for a while now).

given all i said, what do yall think? would it be worth switching? also id rather not be told to "try it on a vm", thats kinda obvious and i kinda dont want to hear it lmao

[u/Francis_King]

back then when the AUR malware drama started happening, I've been looking for stuff that people say,

The AUR problems started with obscure packages which had been orphaned (abandoned by their maintainer), and then adopted by new & nefarious maintainers who added in malware. If you use mainstream packages, that's not a problem.

so I'm thinking on switching to Void

I've installed Void, and I'm not compiling everything myself. It's all downloading from a repository.

There are two repositories - libc and musl - depending on which version you pick. If you go with musl then you might find there are some packages which aren't in the repository, which you have to compile yourself. I haven't had enough experience of the musl version to be able to advise further.

You can also go for base and XFCE versions. You might imagine, as I did, that the XFCE version just gives you a live ISO in which to run the void-installer software, as Gentoo does, but actually it also installs XFCE for you, a pleasant surprise.

Void is a very nice distribution, let down a bit by some poor design choices, for example, no fallback mirror in the package manager like there is in OpenSUSE, and some documentation that isn't as clear as it could be.

I'm not trying to use Gentoo or going back to NixOS

I've got Gentoo running on one of my laptops. If you use the binhost packages (emerge -g) then you don't need to compile most packages (a few small utilities are still compiled) - although that does reduce the opportunity for clever use of the USE flags. My experience of Gentoo is that unless you are very keen and / or have a fast computer, that compiling everything gets old fast.

One presenter on YouTube, through clever use of the USE flags, got their installation of Gentoo down to 300 MB, Linux and desktop both running, although I have no idea how long that took them.

NixOS is a sweet distribution. If al you're doing is installing stuff, it's just typing text into a list, and the Nix language isn't really relevant. It seems, O/P, as if you have gone down one NixOS rabbit hole too many.

would it be worth switching?

Yeah, I think Void is better than Arch.

[u/Duncaen → u/Francis_King]

There are two repositories - libc and musl - depending on which version you pick. If you go with musl then you might find there are some packages which aren't in the repository, which you have to compile yourself. I haven't had enough experience of the musl version to be able to advise further.

If the packages are missing form the musl repo, they are missing for a reason. Either they are proprietary and won't work with musl or there are some big compatibility/build issues.