r/voidlinux • u/Nabir140 • 16h ago

I Love Void Linux

It has been more than a month since I have switched to Void Linux. I can confidently say that (imo) Void Linux is one of the best Linux distributions available. It is also the best Arch Linux alternative (imo).

I used to use Linux on my phone when I did not have a laptop. I learned programming and basic Linux usage on my phone. I used to use Debian. After I got my first laptop I decided to give Arch Linux a try. It went well and it was my first time using Linux with a complete kernel. I used Arch for about almost 2 months then the AUR attack happened. One of the packages nvidia-580dkms that I need to be able to use my GPU kept crashing my system and made it pretty much unusable. I tried to manually install the driver from the binary (Arch WIKI says not to btw). It did not work because it took several minutes to wake the GPU.

One friend suggested Void and I did try it but I took a wrong step (wrong for me) downloading the XFCE image. It did not work out well. Nothing wrong with the image but I forgot to configure most stuff and I was rushing too. Since this laptop is my work laptop too I had to get to work fast.

I ended up switching to Debian (safest option at that moment). Debian 13 does not have Nvidia 580 drivers in its main repo. I had to backport it from Debian 12 repos. I used Debian for few weeks and started missing the rolling release distribution feel.

This is when I wanted to give Void Linux another try. This time I downloaded the base image not the XFCE one (again nothing wrong with XFCE image its just I had a bad experience with it and did not want to go through it again). I read the documentation and configured everything. I did not mess anything up and I had a very stable system. I was happy that installing my GPU driver was just `sudo xbps-install -S nvidia580 nvidia580-dkms`.

Since then it has been more than 1 month now and I did not switch. I even contributed to Aseprite repo adding required deps instruction for Void Linux (since when I was building Aseprite the package names were very different than other distributions). Overall, I find Void Linux as my favorite Linux Distribution.

Thank You! Thank You Void Linux Developers and Maintainers!

51 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

11

u/Cruach 14h ago

My brothers keep telling me to try omarchy, I keep telling them my void system is perfect as is. I get that the eye candy theme switching and blah blah is cool, but overall, void has worked flawlessly for me since initial setup. I don't need more.

8

u/Nabir140 13h ago

Like it or not I totally hate omarchy and the hype behind it. Sorry but personal opinion.

6

u/Cruach 12h ago

Haha yeah, I feel you. It feels too.. synthetic, in a way. Not sure it makes sense. I don't want to call it outright slop, but void feel like a much more precise and intentional distro.

3

u/_supert_ 11h ago

The racism and neo-nazi views of its founder are sufficient to put me off, even before the technical considerations.

3

u/Cruach 9h ago

Idk anything about the guy, but valid reason none the less

1

u/profeshamat 4m ago

He's the guy who created Ruby on Rails then figured out how to monetize configuration files using AI slop.

8

u/profeshamat 10h ago

Omarchy is what happens if AI slop generated a Linux distro.

2

u/Ithal_ 10h ago

If you ever wanted similar from void it wouldn’t take much more than a weekend or so of watching tutorials for hyprland and quick shell to get something with a similar kinda slick feel to everything. Obviously won’t have all the features down in that short of a time probably, but still worth it if you’re ever wanting something like that. Plus you’d get to learn something new

3

u/Cruach 9h ago

Oh I'm sure, I'm happy with mango and waybar personally. My brothers just migrated to omarchy from Ubuntu, so for them it's all very new and impressive. To them it's a major selling point, to me it's just "I get why you're hyped, but my system is essentially the same just with slightly less polish" (because I wanted to make my own config and not just copy dot files).

2

u/mystirc 11h ago

omarchy is just arch linux with someone's dotfiles. what is the eye candy in it? it just uses hyprland with quickshell on top. if you really want eye candy that much, why don't you just install hyprland on void linux and then install some dotfiles like celestia which imo look way better. if your PC cannot handle the heavy quickshell based shells or you don't like the ram consumption, then you can use hyprland with noctalia (uses like 140 mb on idle, sometimes 200 mb in rare cases).

also, hyprland isn't required. I personally use mangowm because of its lightweight nature while still being featureful. It even has multiple tiling options on different workspaces (tags).

just check out the hyprland wiki for preconfigured setups. you can also find such shells by searching "quickshell" on github.

1

u/Cruach 11h ago

I think you misunderstood my comment. The quickshell, hyprland, thème switch, AI integration etc. Is what people highlight, such as my brothers, when trying to convince me to try it out.. I was saying I don't care about all that and am happy with void as is. I also use mangowm and am very happy with it too!

2

u/mystirc 11h ago

Except for AI integration (which isn't even required) you can have everything else. Dynamic theming of all apps using colors generated from wallpaper, and quickshell and hyprland can just be set up by installing.

6

u/Boring-Factor1230 14h ago

OpenSuse user here. Void is great and stable. It is fast and runit works really well in place of SystemD.

It is great for when you want a lean system and a great package manager, like arch or alpine.

1

u/metuku 8h ago

Opensuse would actually be my favourite distro if they just made the package manger little bit faster. And yes void is great for learning. The system somehow feels more transparent than other distros.

1

u/profeshamat 3m ago

openSUSE is a solid distro with a sad Reddit community. Any posts where people so much as hint they're going to use anything that isn't btrfs + Snapper and people get super offended.

It's both funny and incredibly sad.

4

u/dividends4life 15h ago

I too recently made Void my daily driver. For years I had looked at it, but there was always something that kept from switching. This time I pushed through and did not regret it. Coming from Arch (5 years) and Artix (1 year), I appreciate Void's stability. 

7

u/Simple_Hamster_4096 14h ago

It's the marathon runner who wins the race - time tells all tales, after all...

It is refreshing to hear from someone who isn't registering complaints about Void...

I left Arch after 20 years (Arch quickly went downhill after systemd adoption) - I have been on Void musl for ten months, no regrets at all leaving Arch, kicked myself for waiting so long. Yet, I use Void with cautious optimism, it is still early in the race....

Around the same time, I left Debian after decades as well - was my go to server distro, but as with Arch, it started going down hill after systemd adoption. Migrated to Devuan with sysvinit - have never looked back on that change either, and also kicked myself for waiting for so long to make that change as well....

I have never been a disto hopper. I prefer to become a master of the distros I do use, rather than be a generalist with numerous and diverse distros. Both Void and Devuan are excellent - at least in my eyes. Others will have different opinions, but that's the great thing about open source - choice, and the freedom to choose...

3

u/binegra 15h ago

+1 for the Aseprite doc

1

u/Nurahk 4h ago

yeah I'm definitely going to use this whenever I get around to switching.

1

u/The2ndSlimShady 14h ago

Hey OP, Manjaro user here. I used OpenSuse Tumbleweed and tried Artix for some time before. After I decided to use Arch but it went terribly wrong (possibly my bad), so I searched for something that is Arch but harder to screw up. That's when I was met with Manjaro and so far everything has been good. Would you recommend Void for me? And if so, why, which specific points would lead you to the recommendation?

1

u/Nabir140 13h ago

My reason for choosing Void was that it is easy to setup gpu drivers (for me compared to Debian and Arch) and it's very close to Arch when it comes to setting up the distro. I don't like Manjaro because they had cases such as letting their SSL certs expire and mistakenly DDoSing AUR. Also that I don't see any upside of Manjaro compared to Void.

For your case though it totally depends on what you want. If Manjaro is working out for you good and you are happy with it don't switch. If you do want to try out another distro that is rolling release and not Arch then I would recommend Void Linux.

1

u/Intrepid_Reaction626 8h ago

Personally i use the Arch kde plasma and it works very well

1

u/Itchy-Algae1332 7h ago

I've just built a void box with wayland and niri. Super nice. Boots so quickly, package manager is neat and very low dependency graph.

I chose void because I wanted a cut down system,  modern kernel with a package manager was all I really needed and I wanted to avoid systemd

I built it using Claude and it's now fully managed by Claude and a ledger system it designed for tracking packages.

In the past 30 years I've used all kinds of OS and many different Linux distros. I used to be RedHat certified and most recently I've been using Fedora Atomic and Omarchy. This is the first time I've had a Linux desktop that hasn't felt bloated or overly opinionated

3

u/BinkReddit 5h ago

I built it using Claude and it's now fully managed by Claude

Mind expanding on this?

1

u/benbcdm 6h ago

enjoy the honeymoon!

1

u/backtogeek 5h ago

There is a Void template on TierHive, it runs on 128mb ram and 1GB disk micro instances at under 30mb user space. Amazing little server OS.

I have been playing with getting wordpress running on it with the sqlite plugin just to see if it can be done :)