I’ll try keep this short and concise.
I’ve been on Fedora for about 2 months now and it is one of the few distros to have all the packages I use (albeit, via COPR).
I recently read an article about Void and it seemed very appealing to me. I’ve been wanting to move onto something more minimal, and Void, with Runit and with its scripts that it ships with, as well as giving me a new init system and package manager to learn, seems amazing.
In terms of getting all my stuff on Void, their package search suggests all the packages I currently need are available for it.
Only potential sources of trouble are:
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Hyprland is an unofficial package
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Pywlroots and Pywayland (for qtile Wayland) don’t exist, BUT there is a qtile-wayland package
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My broswer of choice, Floorp, will have to be ran as a flatpak, which may cause issues, especially performance issues, as I’m a serious tab hoarder.
I want to learn more about Void’s systems by using them, but I’m not sure if the transition is worthwhile.
Is the bootup/shutdown speed, and faster package management really worth it? Is it really significant enough?
If your hobby is technology and you enjoy spending time learning this stuff, then go for it. You’ll probably have a good time, and you likely won’t stop at Void.
If this is more of a grass is greener over there thing, then consider that constantly switching your software environment is just time taken from something else, and it’s time you’ll never get back. Ever. The pursuit of minimalism can often bring the opposite of its desire effect.
I was a serious Arch user for 10+ years when I finally decided to give Void a go on an old laptop. Needless to say Iloved it so much that it is now my daily driver. I even had a blip for a month where I thought I missed Arch but nope I just came running back home to Void. Give it a try you won’t be disappointed also take a read of this blog Unmasking the hidden gems of Void Linux
This is not an answer or recommendation btw, just chiming in my 2c as an Arch and Fedora user who’s tried Void for a while.
From what I’ve experienced, there was no visible difference in the startup/shutdown speed (compared to Arch). This was on a Zen 4 mini PC, with a Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe. But I suspect it’ll be the same for anyone who’s on any modern system with an NVMe drive. But, if you’re on an older PC with a spinning disk or limited RAM, you might notice a difference. But both Void and Arch were visibly faster at startup/shutdown compared to Fedora, but we’re only talking about a couple of seconds here. Again, on an NVMe, startup/shutdown speeds shouldn’t really be relevant these days, unless there’s some bug or misconfiguration slowing down your init.
I definitely do like the idea of using musl over the bloated glibc, but there’s still far too many programs out there dependent on it, so you won’t be able to get rid of glibc completely on a full-fledged desktop.
The package manager (xbps) wasn’t visibly faster compared to pacman either (especially with pacman’s parallel downloads). Also, I missed the unique features found in certain AUR helpers, like pikaur, which showed the latest Arch news and package comments.
However xbps is definitely a lot faster than the current dnf on Fedora, although that gap may close with dnf5 - which you can install if you want to. I haven’t tested dnf5 yet though so can’t comment on it. The xtools features in Void were pretty nifty, but in saying that, the lack of them on other distros wasn’t that big of a dealbreaker.
Finally, for me, ultimately what I’m after is performance, and Arch with x86-64-v4 packages and the BORE scheduler performed much better overall compared to vanilla Void (or Fedora for that matter). If Void had x86-64-v4 as well, I might consider using it as one of my primary distros, but at present, I’d relegate it to niche scenarios where system resources are limited.
If you want to use Void without transitioning, just install it in a VM and give it a good try. With the state of KVM these days there’s very little performance overhead and you can definitely daily-drive Void inside a VM, and then form your own conclusions as to whether its worth switching or not.
Is the bootup/shutdown speed, and faster package management really worth it? Is it really significant enough?
No. The primary reasons why you’d want to use Void Linux are the musl packages, the easy packaging experience with XBPS, and the simplicity of Runit. The distro felt like BSD on Linux when I last used it (it’s admittedly been a few years since then); I liked it. If the above things interest you, then go for it; otherwise, stick with Fedora.
Well, it’s up to you to decide if advantages of a distro are more significant to you then disadvantages.
I would argue that the best part about void is not actually runit and xbps, but minimalist dependencies.
I wouldn’t care about unofficial status of hyprland package, since it is unofficial in most distros.
And about the lack of some software. There is a thing, called xdeb, that allows you to automatically convert any deb package to xbps package (with correct dependencies). You can even automatically install them from any deb repository via xdeb-install tool.
