Void

Reader supplied reviews for Void Average rating 9.1 from 228 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: 1 Date: 2025-07-06 Votes: 0 A pretty bad Linux distro, honestly, in many ways. Even though it’s supposed to be a rolling release, some updates are really slow. Like, slower than some non-rolling distros. There are even packages that haven’t been updated in ages. That might not break stability, but it definitely makes you wonder about security. It uses runit as its init system. Sure, it’s fast and lightweight, but it’s also super poor. It’s missing important stuff, like handling service dependencies properly, and overall it just feels underwhelming. The package manager is alright. It’s fast and the syntax is nice and clean, kind of like pacman. But honestly, it’s nothing special. Doesn’t really stand out compared to what other distros offer. The system runs fast for the most part, but a bunch of apps don’t feel as smooth as they should. Some even freeze now and then. I’ve tried the same apps on other distros, and they worked way better there. No clue why that happens here. Probably the one thing that makes this distro interesting is that it supports an alternative libc, in this case musl. But even that didn’t impress me. Performance was way worse than what I’ve seen with Alpine, for example. On top of all that, I ran into a bunch of driver issues. Some of my hardware and peripherals just didn’t work properly, which made using the system a pain. That’s what finally made me give up on it. It might improve over time, but as it stands right now, it’s a big no from me. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-06-30 Votes: 16 Rolling, yet stable distro. Xbps is fast and easy to use, can build from source ala gentoo if like, you also can host your own package repository easily. The distro philosophy is to KISS (keep it simple, stupid), so there is no systemd, everything is a file, it's in your face. You have a good selection of achitectures, glibc or musl. I use it on my servers, wsl on the job laptop, my laptop, my desktop, and I never experienced any problem, so it passes the "it works on my machine" I guess... If you like the stability of Debian, and like "being on the edge" of Arch, Void is the distro for you. Give it a try! I did out of curiosity and I am rocking it for 2 years now. The community is great, come see us on IRC liberachat! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-06-24 Votes: 10 Installed (glibc version) on a laptop (HP spectre 13af series) as the only OS. The installation process was very easy and straightforward, no issues there. I used cfdisk to partition the drive and kept the previosu /home partition (Debian Trixie). After the base system, I installed KDE Plasma+sddm (wayland) and almost all configuration from the previous system worked well, some themes were not ported yet to Plasma 6. Also some minor details regarding some qt5 applications not picking the system fonts. I think this is not a Void issue. I would say than in less than an hour I had a usable desktop with the necessary applications for my daily use. The resources used on idle are very similar compared to my previous Debian Trixie, but I noticed an improvement in speed on booting and at application launch. The only thing that I'm not used (yet) is the xbps-query command to search for packages, I'm still using the website to search packages and then copy the package name and install it using xbps-install. (apt is superior in this). I got used to runit very fast, at the moment, is a lot easier than systemd. The void handbook is also very clear and easy to understand. I used it to configure pipewire (wireplumber) and worked great on first try. Solid distro to use daily if you know what do you want. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 228 reader reviews of Void...