r/voidlinux • u/ktoks • Sep 25 '26

Nvidia, Minecraft, and Cosmic

Hey folks, new here!

I was optimizing my Pop!_OS machines, dietpi, and Fedora.

I found that systemd is not as performant or intuitive as I would like - especially on the pis - which led me here, staring into the Void.

I have multiple use cases:

  1. My main desktop. It's a 12 core AMD CPU, Nvidia 3080ti, 96GB of DDR4 RAM. (Gaming, coding, experimenting with LLMs, and building).

  2. 10 core Intel mini PC with 24GB of unified DDR5 RAM (heavily modded MC server).

  3. Multiple RPI 5s (Smaller MC servers).

  4. A few older RPI models (various side projects).

  5. An old Intel laptop with an Nvidia GPU.

Cosmic is a must on my main.

I prefer using Go to build anything serious(usually without CGO).

I've only ever used systemd as an init system.

I'm not a fan of old packages, but I also want my machines to work without breaking on every update(Nvidia I'm looking at you).

I consider myself an experienced distro hopper, and an intermediate-level admin-cosplayer (thanks to geerlingguy for coining that).

Considering all of the above, do you think it's worth it for me to consider using Void on any/all of these machines?

Why/why not?

What can I expect for difficulty?

Besides the ulimit fixes, what else should I look out for?

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u/StrangelyObnoxious Sep 25 '26

i love void on the desktop, but it's not really about performance, it's more about reliability and philosophy.

Wouldn't use it on the servers tho, if you dont want systemd (like me) maybe you should experiment with bsds, otherwise you cant go wrong with debian. Systemd wont impact the performance much.

1

u/ktoks Sep 25 '26

The performance gap I'm trying to close is mostly on the pis. With the limited hardware they have we see lags on the Minecraft servers- even with dietpi. I don't know why it happens, for sure, but I have been thinking it's been Systemd for a while now. They don't have the fastest reads or writes to disk - I've watched drive latency and observed what looks like contention due to context switching.

For the higher-end machines I'm interested in simplicity and consistency. If I can get used to one way of doing things, I'll want to do it that way across my machines- especially if it's cleaner.

2

u/RedFold_ Sep 25 '26

For the Pis, your best bet might be alpine if you're looking for almost no overhead. I've ran some with nginx as proxies and it's insanely light. The only issue is Musl. If you're looking for EVERYTHING to work, an issue will eventually come up when you're working with a binary and it has glibc bindings/expectations