A love letter to Void Linux

I installed Void on my current laptop on the 10th of December 2021, and there has never been any reinstall.

The distro is absurdly stable. It’s a rolling release, and yet, the worst update I had in those years was one time, GTK 4 apps took a little longer to open on GNOME. Which was reverted after a few hours. Not only that, I sometimes spent months without any update, and yet, whenever I did update, absolutely nothing went wrong. Granted, I pretty much only did full upgrades, and never partial upgrades, which generally help a lot. Still.
↫ Sarah Mathey

Void is love, Void is life. It’s such an absurdly good distribution, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I prefer Fedora KDE by a hair, I’d be using Void on all of my machines. The only reason I’m not is that I would set up Void very close to what I get from Fedora KDE out of the box anyway, so my laziness gets the better of me there. I used to run Void on my POWER9 hardware, but that architecture is no longer supported by Void.

If you’re looking for a Linux distribution free of systemd, there’s little out there that can equal or top Void, and even if you don’t care much about init systems, Void still has a lot to offer. The documentation is decent, its package manager is a joy to use, the repositories are loaded and up-to-date, and it strikes a great balance between building an entire Linux system from scratch on the one hand, and complete desktop distributions like Fedora on the other. The best way I can describe it is that Void feels like the most BSD-y of Linux distributions.

Void is my fallback, in case Fedora for whatever reason slips up and dies. IBM, Red Hat, “AI” – there’s a lot of pits Fedora can fall into, after all.