Finally, me too into the void.

8 days ago by tumbling4986 to c/voidlinux

After hours of setup, I successfully installed and setup Void Linux on my laptop.

I'm into daily driving it and have no idea how it will end up as a complete 'runit' beginner. Also, I don't use Flatpak at all.

fozid 6 points 8 days ago

welcome! i a have been running void on my daily driver main pc for around a year now. No complains at all. Moved from Arch which i ran for around 15 years. I also dont use flatpack/snap etc. i really like the simplicity of runit and it just works.

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victorz 2 points 7 days ago

I've been on Arch for about a decade now and have no complaints, so, I'm curious, why did you switch from Arch after such a long time? To get away from systemd and to use runit? Any other reason(s)?

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fozid 1 point 7 days ago

My main reasons were I felt arch had changed it's philosophy over the years, moved away from the real keep it simple idea, and started to move more towards making it easier and more accessible for other people, which I felt was dumbing it all down and just didn't have the same attraction for me. Then the more tangible reasons were I felt systemd was over kill for what it does, wanted to try something simpler and more readily adjustable, and also I found quite a few breaking up dates, with arch trying to be almost bleeding edge, updates would come out that broke my system. Void offered a solution to all that.

Still rolling release but not bleeding edge, so updates have time to be made safe first, runit is so simple and easy to understand, and the setup is only whatever you make it. It reminds me of arch from 15 years ago.

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victorz 1 point 7 days ago

Yeah systemd is a beast that I haven't even begun to try to understand yet. It's quite daunting. I bet it's easy once you understand but before that happens, it seems almost insurmountable.

Imma look into Void and see what it's about, but I don't think I'll switch anytime soon as nothing I have installed breaks for me as of yet. 😅

Hey, thanks for replying, I appreciate it. 🫶

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Crumpled6273 1 point 8 days ago

Nice to know.

Actually, don't know why but I got a satisfaction of achieving something big with Void. Usually no matter which distro, fedora, debian, opensuse, arch, etc... I always get a urge to switch between them.

But Void doesn't give such an urge, maybe the reason is my 3 failures to try to install it and 4th one was almost successful. But after getting know more again I required to reinstall entire repo. No everything is rock-solid and user friendly. Void + runit + KDE + No extra bloats.

Highlight : The official free and non-free repo only contains apps that matters and no extra gui app store, fonts, themes, etc.

(The only reason for previous failures is me who was lazy to read everything in manual and listen full youtube guides)

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Cris_Citrus 4 points 8 days ago

I hope your time with it treats you well :)

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Crumpled6273 2 points 8 days ago

Me too. I didn't installed it in an hype, but the minimalism it gives and the unique working style.

I think most people are sticking with systemd and not taking a look at another init systems because major distributions like debian, fedora, opensuse, arch, etc. are sticking with systemd.

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DupaCycki 2 points 8 days ago

As a NixOS user, I'm very curious about Void. Obviously, it doesn't offer declarative configuration or perfect reproducibility, but I don't necessarily need it on all my systems. That'd be too much maintenance for me.

I was going to try Alpine on my older Thinkpad X240, but maybe Void would work well, too.

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Crumpled6273 2 points 8 days ago

I don't know what it's mean by too much maintenance but for now I understood that the first effort to setup a system we want is all the effort. Then everything flows like a stream.

Maybe future updates or upgrades require user level configurations but I don't think thats too a big issue.

Btw, I too heard about NixOS but as you said about Void, NixOS is not for me too. How is your experience there? It is more like an immutable distro right?

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DupaCycki 3 points 8 days ago

By too much maintenance I mean needless manual work on systems that I don't care as much about.

On some of my PCs (e.g., TV-dedicated mini PC shared with my gf) I prefer having Fedora, because it does everything by itself, and I can just focus on other PCs, which are more important for me, such as my main laptop.

Which is why I don't run NixOS on everything. That'd be way too much work, and not worth it for me.

Depending on how much work - both one-time and recurring - Void needs, perhaps it could work for me on those devices. Fedora is a little heavy, and I was thinking about replacing it anyway.

As for NixOS in general, I'm not sure if it fits the definition of 'immutable', but the end result is pretty much the same. Very stable, incredibly easy recovery if something breaks. And you can fairly easily copy your setup over to more devices, though of course some things will need to be manually changed.

The one downside is, even if you have a working setup, sometimes you'll have to manually update some configs, due to NixOS changes or other software changes, etc. It's usually simple, but if you leave your PC and come back after half a year for some reason - you may have some work to do. Especially if you daily drive something like hyprland - which is very popular on NixOS - because it's now known for radical changes to its config structure.

I'm still learning the Nix language, and how the entire package manager and OS work, so maybe there are solutions or improvements to this. I first started using NixOS about half a year ago, so I'm by no means an expert or anything.

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