Void

Reader supplied reviews for Void Average rating 9.1 from 262 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: -- current202502022024031420230628202210012021093020191109201811112017100720150221 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: 10 Date: 2026-02-08 Country: Brazil Votes: 17 Void Linux has been my daily driver for over a year now, after a long stretch of hopping between Arch, Fedora, and even Debian Stable, and what still surprises me is how it manages to feel like a rolling release without the constant tension. It's current, but calm. You notice the difference right at boot. Runit brings the system up in seconds, services are just small scripts in /etc/sv, and enabling one is a simple symlink. No giant service managers, no opaque logging layers, just straightforward Unix logic. It's the first init system I've used that actually feels pleasant instead of something you fight against. XBPS is another highlight. Updates are extremely fast, and the shared library tracking means upgrades rarely break anything. When I want custom software, xbps-src builds everything in a clean chroot and lets me install or even host my own packages without polluting the system. It gives you AUR or ports-level flexibility, but in a much cleaner, more controlled way. I also tested the musl edition on another machine and was surprised by how light and tidy it felt. Most of my daily software works out of the box, and when something doesn't, the community is quick to patch and upstream fixes. The whole ecosystem feels small but sharp. What really makes Void stand out is that it's built from scratch: its own package manager, build system, and init, all designed to stay minimal and transparent. Tools like xtools add a lot of power without adding bloat. After getting used to that simplicity, many other distros started to feel overly complicated. Void didn't just replace my previous system, it made Linux fun again. If you like speed, control, and a distro that stays out of your way while still staying up to date, it's hard not to appreciate what it does. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-02-05 Votes: 12 I'd been using Arch for the past 3 years until I decided to give Fedora a shot a few months ago. People always say Fedora ships new tech quickly but is more stable than Arch and breaks less. After actually living with it for a while, I'm not sure I agree. I ran into way more issues than I expected. So after that short stint, I took a deeper look at Void. I liked the whole minimalist, independent philosophy behind it, and a lot of people praise its stability, so I figured I'd try it. After a month of daily use, I honestly couldn't be happier. Running dwm + Xorg it uses a ridiculous 200–220 MB of RAM. In 2026 that's kind of wild. Even after hours of use the resource usage barely drifts, and if I close everything and go back to an idle state, it settles very close to the original footprint. It feels extremely consistent. The system is smooth, no bottlenecks, no stuttering feeling, even with several programs open pushing CPU and GPU. I also haven't had any tearing issues, which I sometimes dealt with on Arch even with a compositor. The repos have a solid package selection, I've barely needed Flatpaks, and when I did, they worked perfectly fine here. I really feel like I finally found a distro I can stick with for a long time. I'm enjoying it a lot so far, and it's absolutely worth trying if you're curious. No regrets for me. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-02-01 Votes: 12 So much about Void appeals to me that talking about it might sound a bit biased. I've been using it on my personal computer and on a small local server for about a year and a half now, and its stability is simply impressive, especially considering that it has stayed solid all this time without ever needing a reinstall or breaking on me. I absolutely love the minimalist approach the distribution takes, from the init system all the way to the packages. Basically, it will only install exactly what you tell it to. Some programs even ship without certain extra features, since those are provided by other packages that act as optional dependencies and are not strictly required for the program to run. I personally love this, because most of the time I don’t use those extra features anyway. Having them as optional makes everything much more modular and flexible, depending on whether the user actually wants that "extra" or not. Besides being stable, it's also very fast, even on weaker systems that might struggle with certain tasks. This is noticeable right from boot time, since Void uses runit as its init system and service supervisor. Runit has a very small and clean codebase, which results in extremely fast boot times, minimal memory footprint, and practically nonexistent CPU usage. Void also stands out by supporting more than one libc implementation, namely GNU libc and musl. Honestly, for personal use, I find musl a bit troublesome and sometimes annoying to deal with, mainly because of the level of support it gets from applications. Most software tends to favor GNU, since it is more mainstream. That said, when efficiency and resource usage are the priority, musl is amazing. I really like the idea of using it on embedded systems or small servers, which happens to be my case. The package manager is interesting and relatively easy to learn and use, especially since its syntax is somewhat reminiscent of pacman, even though some commands are a bit more "intuitive". Nothing too surprising or wildly different from other options out there, but it definitely deserves praise for being built from scratch, like most things in Void, and for being extremely functional and fast. You also get something similar to the AUR build system through xbps-src, which uses recipes. It's certainly not as vast as the AUR options, but it's just as functional, and creating or porting a recipe to the xbps-src style isn't difficult at all. I actually found it pretty fun to play around with. Speaking broadly and without getting overly technical, that's basically it. Void is definitely a distribution that deserves more attention. Beyond the stability it offers, even while being a rolling-release distro, almost everything about it is different, nearly unique in a way, and yet it all works really well. My experience with it over this time has been a solid 10/10. Highly recommended. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 262 reader reviews of Void...