From Arch to Void GNU/Linux
After months of running Arch. I have finally decided to distrohop again. This
time I’m trying Void Linux an interesting, indie-distro that my friend
recommended to try.
Unlike the majority of distros — which blatantly skin Ubuntu / fork Debian.
Void is built independently, so it has it’s own package manager. The
XBPS package ecosystem. The lack of
support for systemd rejoice systemd haters! Flatpak is supported, if needed.
Most free/libre software apps can be compiled from source, or have some form of
executable like appimages as a last resort.
Without systemd: the time to boot has significantly reduced
I can boot under 3s with runit. Systemd takes an average of 14s to boot. Even with an SSD! To be honest — I didn’t really care about the init system running on my computer; at least till yesterday - when I was using Arch. I didn’t have any specific use of systemd - so runit easily replaces it for my everyday usage.
RAM usage has also gone down by a few hundred megabytes
Idles at around 300mb now. I don’t have anything specific to Arch that I miss. Probably the frequency of updates I get in a week. Other than that everything is okay. Arch really didn’t bother me, I didn’t use the AUR much updates never wrecked anything. The same old stack: Wayland, Pipewire all work fine. Setting up / porting from one distro to another takes a bit of time. Artix, Devuan & other systemd free distros might be worthy of my time in a VM some day. But today I’m happy with void. Oh and probably no more “i use arch btw” from me ;)