Void

Reader supplied reviews for Void Average rating 9.1 from 242 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: 10 Date: 2025-11-06 Votes: 0 Void Linux was like a hurricane of fresh air, after using debian for god knows how long. I was initially terrified that the bare CLI version comes with basically nothing with exception of bare essentials. However it was very rewarding to build my desktop slowly. Once it was finished the results shocked me. I'm not sure if I somehow screwed with debian or something, however compared to debian, it was night and day. Void basically uses nothing, packages are incredibly lean. I've personally seen around 5x less space usage (from 250GB to 50Gb roughly) with ram usage being basically 3x less. Void also doesn't come with system packages that require other languages. It's all C programs. Which was very pleasing for my case due to not enjoying python or rust. Additionally runit, while hard to initially to learn how to use (compared to systemd), becomes very natural to use. I appreciated that xbps did not set any daemon I installed immiditly to run. I'm sure some people also have this issue of just wanting the daemon and not for it to run every time your system starts (I am aware I can disable after install in systemd distros, however that's just inconvenient for my case). Package availability was just barely enough. I felt lucky that the packages I used in my old debian install were happen to be here. With big distros like arch, debian, and fedora the sheer package availability and software being catered to you is a blessing. You can just install the .aur or .rpm file and bam you are done. Unfortunately you don't have the same comforts with void, I had to dig into few .deb files and install few programs as tarballs. The community is really helpful on this front. There were a lot of information and tools to install programs that aren't packaged for void. Lastly the community has been great. I've had the pleasure of talking to few people in #voidlinux on libera.chat. Really helpful and patient community from my experience. Overhaul void is amazing, if it gets catered a bit more and more packages are made for it. It would be literally a no-brainer. 9.5/10 Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-10-15 Votes: 38 Been using it almost since it exists and it's just wonderful. As with any Linux distro, stuff can happen, but void is one of the stupid simple distros out there where almost anything runs. Runit is so nice to use and the package manager is just awesome and really really fast (and quite simple). Rolling updates are also very good to have and you rather have good control over updates. The setup process may look dated, but it's also dead simple. I'm also using it on servers and it is a really reliable distro, if you don't overstretch it - wich you shouldnt, because that's what windows is doing. Mind you: it's maybe not THE distro for beginners, also depending on the device you want to run it. In my experience it's not so superb on notebooks, but that's a linux thing anyway. Every distro has its' quirks on mobile devices. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 1 Date: 2025-10-09 Votes: 0 Void was a pretty bad experience for me in several ways. I decided to try it out one day because I’d heard some good things about it (along with a few bad ones), but not everything you hear is true; maybe it’s just personal taste, or maybe it’s just personal favoritism from people who like the distro. The documentation is okay but a bit too short and direct, leaving a lot of things unclear, and if you ever have questions, finding answers can be tough since there’s no proper forum for support, which is something people often complain about. Another thing that bothered me is how long it takes for new installation images to come out; it feels like that part doesn’t get much attention. The installation script is very minimal and kind of rough, but that’s what you get unless you want to write your own or go through the manual process. The limited number of mirrors can also be discouraging, since depending on where you live, downloads can be painfully slow, and even the Fastly CDN mirror, which is available globally, sometimes has inconsistent latency. Once installed, the system itself is decent, but I noticed some performance issues with certain packages like Firefox, although the Flatpak version worked fine, so maybe it’s something about how it’s built. Void also feels a bit like a Frankenstein distro, with lots of patches to make apps work on different architectures, which I think might hurt performance on some systems. While using it, I ran into problems where if a dependency for a running service failed, the service depending on it would just stop working because Runit, the init system, doesn’t handle that well. I also had some trouble setting up encryption, which eventually made me give up. Overall, Void feels like it doesn’t have a clear purpose; it tries to do a bit of everything but doesn’t really excel at anything. I used it for about two months, and for me, it wasn’t worth it, but if you’re looking for something different, maybe give it a shot. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 242 reader reviews of Void...