Void

Reader supplied reviews for Void Average rating 9.2 from 214 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Void? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 202502022024031420230628202210012021093020191109201811112017100720150221 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 20250202 Rating: 6 Date: 2025-04-24 Votes: 0 I wouldn't recommend this distro to newbies, nor even to intermediate users. I personally found it harder to set up than Slackware or Arch. Installing the base system from a rootfs tarball via an already running system was dead simple. I'm using the glibc version with no boot loader (I'm already using refind as boot manager). I'm running multiple distros on this laptop; they each have a dedicated 200MB boot partition. Void is the only one that cannot host 2 kernels by default because its initramfs is huge (100MB). Debian and Arch use 23MB and 28MB resp. and that includes a 4MB plymouth theme. Manually removing unused firmwares (amd/nvidia) dropped the image to 84MB which is still way too big to start up a system. Many packages are missing: you have lightdm but you miss lightdm-sick-greeter; you have cinnamon and xapps but you miss xviewer, etc. Compiling the missing software is a real pain because you have to handle all the dependencies yourself. There has been some pull request to add them (for example slick-greeter) but they received no attention, no comment, and got automatically closed with no reason given. All in all, once set, the system is running perfectly fine (it has been for a month now). It requires some efforts in the beginning but it's then a very good alternative to the major distros. Pros : - It's an independant distro (not based on something else). - No systemd - Its packages are relatively up-to-date. - Apart from firmwares, Void is very light with as little bloat as possible. Cons: - You're not getting any help from the OS when you want something done. For example, if you install a package that has a service (sshd, lightdm, dbus…), you are responsible for both configuring it and enabling it. This contrasts with distros like Debian or even Arch where the package manager does it for you. - Setting up a working DE from scratch reminds me of all the dirty tinkering we used to do in the late 90s. - The documentation is very succinct, lack a lot of crucial information, and is almost useless if you don't already have a very solid linux background. - Setting up the sound system was quite difficult. - Lack of software support. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-04-14 Votes: 0 Void is a distro for advanced users. If you don't know what you are doing it will simply frustrate you. I switched from debian sid to void, im really enjoying it. My only issues were with setting up network manager, just remember to make sure dbus is running!!! I'm using the msul version. It is very minimal, fast and simple. It works well on my 15 year old thinkpad x201. Wifi works, battery works, screen dimming works, everything works. The reason i switched from debian was because it started doing sudden crashes, where it would force shut-down my laptop. I'm not sure why it did that and I've never had that on any other distros. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-04-14 Votes: 0 Void is a general purpose linux distro that is slightly different than others. It uses runit instead of systemd. It is s simple init implementation and may lack some features systemd has. But it's eay more leaner than systemd. It boots in under 10 seconds on my system. It has a learning curve to it but i think it's worth the effort. XBPS is a magnificent package manager, really fast. Repositories are filled with good software. Overall i recommend void to all linux experts who likes diy distros like arch. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 214 reader reviews of Void...