65 lines
5.8 KiB
Markdown
65 lines
5.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Moving to Void Linux"
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date: 2018-01-31T17:00:43+02:00
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slug: "moving-to-void-linux"
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aliases: ["/moving-to-void-linux/"]
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image: /content/images/2018/01/Void-Linux.png
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---
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I've been a distro hopper for quite some time. I've been there, done that on most distros. I started with Ubuntu, then tried Mint, before I ended up staying with Arch for some time. Manjaro also fits somewhere in the middle there. Plus a bunch less important ones.
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```
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Current images were taken on Windows since I finished up the blog post during idle time at work. Will probably bother replacing them later.
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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```
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For quite a while, I settled in with Fedora, where I stayed for a couple months. I'd also used a bunch of less famous distros, like Bunsenlabs (Aka Crunchbang) and even fiddled with PC-BSD/TrueOS. I've been through a bunch is my point. Heck I even owned a $49 copy of Red hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, at one point.
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But some things just kept nagging. They were all small things that broke. Minor annoyances to some, big to others. Maybe that one hard drive would [slow down your boot tremendously](https://twitter.com/Kuwaddo/status/953619574238404610), or maybe performing an update [broke networking](https://twitter.com/Kuwaddo/status/958398252411424768) for some reason. These were all random issues I would find, the majority of which popped up with little or no human interaction during system updates. A quick edit in some config file typically fixed them in a minute, and I moved on. I dealt with these small issues one after another.
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# Discovering the Void
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Fast forward to late 2017 (November I believe), and someone mentions [Void Linux](https://www.voidlinux.eu/) to me on Mastodon. I'd heard of it before, or not heard of as much as I'd just seen it pop up in threads on 4chan's /g/ board. Plus, it generally seemed a bit weird:
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The distro mentions the package manager, LibreSSL, the init system and brags about not being a fork. Techies reading this will instantly think it just reeks of neckbeard and tinfoil hats. And frankly, that presentation was part of the reason I never tried it.
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Many on 4chan bragged about how it didn't use systemd. Which never really mattered to me. I thought systemd was fine, because it started my applications and did its thing. In the past I thought all the issues mentioned earlier were general Linux issues, or some fault with the distributions. I didn't really think systemd had much to do with all the obscure issues I'd seen on every Linux system. `mount` would get the blame for boots stuck on hard drives, and if ssh didn't start properly, I'd probably blame `sshd`.
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It seemed logical, systemd starts things and they run. I'd heard about it taking control of more and more system components, but I'd never really thought about exactly what that meant.
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But back to the guy on Mastodon, he told me it was a pretty okay distro. The timing was probably a good reason, since I was planning to move from Fedora anyways.
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# Entering the Void
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*Fancy (and edgy) slogan that makes for, eh?*
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I took the dive and installed Void, with the Mate desktop to be specific. The first weeks were a bit rough. Some packages in the repo were were broken the day after I installed, causing Mate updates to fail. Not the best first impression. But that was due to it being a small distro, somewhat understandable when you don't have a huge team of maintainers. I also must have had amazingly bad timing when installing it.
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They were actively trying to fix it, as the build server's public waterfall showed, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and waited it out. A couple days later, everything was back to normal and I could update my system just fine.
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Following that install, all the other small issues I've had with Linux distros were simply gone. I didn't know where they went, or how they got fixed. But ever since I installed Void, I've never really had to touch a system config file (Except when setting the hardware clock to localtime, because Windows dual-booting)
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Now, about 3-4 months in, I run Void Linux on all 3 of my main computers. And so many others that I even use a bootstrap script to set it up for me.
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While I don't know the details of how runit works, doing `sv up`, `sv down` and symlinking files from `/etc/sv` to `/var/service` has been perfectly fine. Using `xbps` has also been nice and fast. While I don't use many particularly fancy features, I'd say it's definitely comparable to `pacman` in terms of pure speed. It's still not quite at the same level as FreeBSD's `pkg`, but certainly close enough.
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However, after this incident, Void has perturbed me a bit about systemd. I don't exactly hate systemd now, but I definitely find myself preferring systemd-less distros. To match that, I've also started running Devuan on my servers:
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Heck, [even on SBCs](https://twitter.com/Kuwaddo/status/958406013249638401).
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But back to Void Linux for one final moment.
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I don't know if it's the lack of systemd, if it's the fast package manager, or if it's related to musl. It could also be a combination of all those things. Regardless of the reason, so far, Void Linux seems like the distro I've wanted all along.
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I reinstalled Void to use their xfce image, but since then I've happily been running Void for most tasks. Some issues do come with using a lesser known distro (like having to manually extract all those .deb packages). But I feel those trade-offs are easily worth the rest of the experience Void gives me.
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It's the Arch Linux replacement that I wanted, but never found.
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Unless they do some major change which messes a lot with the distro. I'll probably stay with Void for quite some time.
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I'd heavily recommend that you at least give it a quick try for a couple of days if you're a fan of distributions similar to Arch Linux.
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