Void

Reader supplied reviews for Void Average rating 9.1 from 217 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: 2025-05-16 Votes: 4 Best of both worlds: rolling release, but super stable at the same time. It's like Arch but without the constant implosion. Also, no systemd either so that's a nice plus. It has its own package manager with decent variety and also not a spinoff of any other distro, which is pretty rare. Installation can be daunting, especially if you don't want to use the default (Xfce) DE, but it's not as bad as Arch was back in the day and the documentation is pretty decent. Final score: 10/10, cures distrohopping. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-05-13 Votes: 6 Void in one of the few enigmas in the World of Linux. standing out on it's own, not relying on Deb or Arch etc as a base, and it is simply genius for what has been achieved. A cutting edge (one step back from bleeding) rolling release that doesn't have a hissy fit if its not been updated for a month or so. As for the actual OS, you will need a least a solid base of knowledge, otherwise you'll probably end up with an OS that's not working as you'd like, fundamentally because the needed packages have not been installed and configured where necessary., and then you'll blame the OS rather than a lack of knowledge/good attitude. I have it on two thinkpads - one with glibc and cinnamon (ver. 6.4.2), the other with musl and lxqt (ver. 2.2). Both run like a dream, never once had an issue (thats 2+ years for cin., 1+ for lxqt) and they are a lot faster and more stable than the flagships for those 2 de's. Runit is very simple, fast, stable and secure too. Ultimately, fabulous with a bit of grunt work, one to aim for if you're new. Enjoy. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20250202 Rating: 1 Date: 2025-05-10 Votes: 0 This distro brings a mix of feelings, but the most striking one is the clash between expectations and frustration. Void is definitely a niche system, but the few people you usually see talking about it tend to say positive things. After using it for a few weeks, though, I ended up seeing way more negative points than positive ones, and I just can’t wrap my head around the idea of spending more time fixing the system than actually using and enjoying it. Well, I guess there are people who feel good about that and find it rewarding, but that’s not the case for me. Starting with the installation, it’s extremely manual, and even for advanced users, it’s really tedious. There’s no kind of helper here, like a script to automate certain steps, which you do have on Arch, for example. And if you choose the TUI installer, you’ll probably end up dissatisfied with one configuration or another that gets set automatically behind the scenes, and at some point, you’ll likely need to fix it yourself — which was what happened to me. So unless you make your own script to set things up the way you want, or at least get everything working properly, be prepared for some post-install headaches. Another issue I had was with runit, which is Void’s init system. Sometimes when I booted up, I’d end up stuck in the tty, because for some reason, certain services apparently weren’t starting properly due to depending on others. And the truth is, runit doesn’t have proper dependency management. You could call that a trade-off, since on the other hand, it’s very minimal and simple, unlike systemd. The package manager is cool, and it really reminds me of pacman, especially in the syntax, but for some reason, I often ran into trouble downloading or updating packages due to keyring issues. Pretty frustrating. I don’t know if it’s something about how the packages are built or if it’s some kind of incompatibility with my hardware, but some programs were really choppy (I noticed this mostly with Firefox, which didn’t have issues in the flatpak version). Sometimes it would even show some stuttering, which led to visual artifacts on the screen, especially when trying to move or resize the window. I thought it could be something with the compositor, but switching to others or reconfiguring things didn’t help much, and I don’t think that was the real issue anyway, since I didn’t see any screen tearing or similar problems. What they say about Void being “minimal” is definitely true, and you can really see that in the way packages and dependencies are handled. The build recipes seem to only include what’s strictly needed to run the program, but often don’t include dependencies that add features — which in some cases makes things feel broken. That, for me, is a downside, though not necessarily a problem. Still, I think having something like “optional dependencies” would really help in cases like that. Finally, what pushed me away from Void the most, after all these problems, was the fact that many packages take ages to get updated. Sometimes they stay with known vulnerabilities that have already been fixed upstream. On top of that, I found their contribution system extremely bureaucratic and slow. Sometimes it takes months for a pull request to get any attention — if it’s not completely forgotten, especially when it’s something the maintainers don’t seem too interested in. All in all, for now, Void is a solid no for me. I don’t think it’s worth struggling with a system that isn’t as polished as others and that gave me more headaches than practicality or productivity. I also didn’t notice any real difference in resource usage compared to other distros I tried. So yeah, overall it was a big letdown. But it is an interesting project, especially for supporting musl as an alternative libc, and I really do wish them well and hope they improve, especially in the areas I mentioned. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 217 reader reviews of Void...