Void Linux’s average rating soars high on DistroWatch, making it a must-try for advanced users. Learn why it is winning hearts.
https://linuxiac.com/void-linux-topped-distrowatch-average-rating/
Always interested in checking out new distro’s, and I’ve heard of Void in the past, but my only concern with these “independent” distro’s is their package support and availability.
Finding packages for Debian, or Redhat based distro’s is relatively easy due to the sheer number of forked distros and community involvement.
I’ll still probably fire it up in a VM to see what it’s like.
I don’t see that as a problem nowadays, more and more the desktop side of things is moving to cloud native, you got all sorts of containers for apps not packaged in your distro repos, containers like flatpak, snap, appimage etc…, and if you just want something available in other distro you could use distrobox.
It’s quite cool and if it means developers spend less time packaging stuff and more improving Linux as a whole I am all for it.
Give it a try and let me know what packages are you missing, void linux is pretty complete, not bleeding edge but super stable. (A contributor and daily driver of void linux)
If you’re concerned about package availability, you can check here: https://voidlinux.org/packages/ to see if all the packages you need are supported.
I tried void once and I recall that their package manager is very flexible, fast as hell and can be extended similar to what AUR does with xbps-src.
it runs without systemd. I did not like the absence however void itself is (probably because of no systemd) really blazing fast.
DistroWatch rankings are meaningless, but it’s nice to see Void get more attention. It’s still vastly underrated and I see it as a perfect distro
The logo on their site is cool, it spins when you wave your mouse pointer over it. Worth the price of admission.
Thanks, I’ll check it out!
I need a Void fork for beginners
Void is inherently not a very beginner friendly distro. It’s one of my favorites, but its not geared towards beginners at all.
There’s an image pre-built with XFCE. If you’re still not happy with Void, due to the TUI installer, et c., it’s probably a bad distro-choice.
Void was a candidate for a distribution on my main machine some weeks or two months ago when I wanted to try something new after ten years of Arch. There were changes that required a reinstall so I thought why not change. I settled on NixOS in the end though. I believe Void is closer to Arch in the sense that it’s a traditional rolling release distribution?
Edit: even the article states
The main reason for this is that it is primarily aimed at advanced users, and the closest thing to Void we can think of is Arch.
