Karjala's blog

Here's my review of Void linux, a summary of the good and the bad I saw after using this flavour of Linux for well over a year now:

The good:

• Rolling-release distro (you always get very recent software packages, instead of having to wait 2 years for the next official release of your distro, like Debian or Ubuntu), and also you won't have to do a re-install of the operating system.
• It's a STABLE rolling-release distro (much like Tumbleweed), which means you get new packages not immediately when they're released, but after they've been tested a bit, which results in a more stable system that breaks less often than, say, Arch
• Excellent, yet concise, documentation. If you already know some Linux and follow Void's documentation, you're guaranteed to get a working system, as opposed to Arch or Gentoo, whose documentation, while excellent, is not concise.
• The base system is very minimal. You only get extremely few packages and running services by default, and what you get installed on top of that is stuff you know you want or need, resulting in an unencumbered fast and lean (memory-wise) system.
• Unopinionated: You're allowed to choose among many cron daemons, desktop environments, NTP daemons, etc. Void maintainers don't force upon you any choices.
• Easy to contribute to: There are guides on how to add new packages to Void's software repositories, or contribute fixes to them through 'git'.
• Excellent support on IRC chat by people who seem to love this distro.
• Plays Steam games fine.
• Being a community instead than a corporate distro means that it has the interests of its users in mind, rather than pushing un-needed, un-wanted profit-making technologies to them, nor will it ever get discontinued because its parent company doesn't think it's profitable (like Red Hat did with CentOS).
• Extremely fast system updates.

The bad:

• Very rarely (twice during my use of Void Linux), some things do accidentally break, though they do get fixed with a system update after a couple of days. Once it was KDE that broke, and I had to use an alternate desktop environment for a few days until the fix was released. Let's hope maintainers learn from their mistakes.
• Void's software repositories are missing some of the less-used software packages that other distros have, though many of those can be gotten through alternate repositories such as flathub.
• It's not made for absolute beginners of Linux, nor for people who don't want to learn new stuff about Linux.