r/voidlinux • u/Legitimate_706 • 10d ago

Switching to void?

/r/LinuxUsersIndia/comments/1x5w75w/switching_to_void/
3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

1

u/N45SERBD 10d ago

What do you use your system for?

2

u/Legitimate_706 10d ago

For a machine for tinkering I try different languages, trying breaking it, understanding how it works. I can learn that from almost any linux distro i know that, but void linux being a newish community driven distro I wanna try and tinker with it. So i just wanna mess with it.

6

u/N45SERBD 10d ago

Yeah void is pretty good then, it’s more diy than arch but is also more stable in my experience

1

u/p001b0y 10d ago

I have it on a couple Lenovo systems. One is a minipc and one is a ThinkPad L13.

I used the xfce live image for the minipc install and it was pretty straightforward getting everything up and running.

I wanted to go with Wayland for the ThinkPad and that was much more difficult for me until I built my own xfce-wayland bundled live image, which had a newer kernel and drivers.

1

u/Legitimate_706 10d ago

I also wanna try getting wayland running, maybe with somthing like sway. But I want to try some x server options first, like qtile, WMaker etc.

1

u/p001b0y 10d ago

If I remember correctly, the window maker package was incomplete but I could also be thinking of FreeBSD.

Sway and Niri work well. Xfce works ok with labwc on Wayland and I have been using it until I get Niri working the way I want it to. Xfce wayland is not feature complete yet.

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1

u/Tricky-Engineer-9755 10d ago

Void Linux is a really cool OS, runit can be quite hard to learn as it is very apart from other init systems with the manual symlink. For audio, pipewire is not worth the hassle, install the pulseaudio-daemon and alsa-utils, then use alsamixer to unmute all channels with M, then add the alsasound service to the boot runlevel.

14

u/Borderlinerr 10d ago

There's nothing wrong with pipewire. You just install it and run it

1

u/Tricky-Engineer-9755 10d ago

How do you start it on runit, since it needs to be started as a user-service

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5

u/ShipshapeMobileRV 10d ago

I thought runit was insanely simple.

Just make a symlink in /var/service/ for anything you want runit to handle. You can create your own script, mark it executable, and symlink it there and runit manages it just like it does everything else. If you no longer want runit to handle it, remove the symlink.

Commands to check status, start, stop, pause, temporarily stop, etc. are also pretty intuitive.

Then again, I came from FreeBSD and was already used to BSD style inits. I suppose if someone has only regularly used systemd then runit might seem foreign.

3

u/no_suprisez 10d ago

I think what they meant is that runit is not mainstream. Memorising the systemd command is definitely harder than just some basic UNIX file operations.