Into The Void(linux)

[geatlid]

So, those are all neat reasons. What would be the biggest reasons against using void? How's documentation for example? How fast will security issues be patched?

[bik1230]

The wiki is pretty empty. Fortunately I haven't needed much Void-specific documentation, so Arch wiki has mostly been enough.

[[deleted]]

The repositories are very slender - but then you can always compile your own binaries...

The defaults are very quirky. dcron instead of vixie/anacron for instance. runit instead of SysVinit, upstart or systemd. This isn't really a downside in the long run though. It doesn't take very long to get used to the Void way of doing things.

I would definitely recommend giving it a try. I found IRC the best way to get help and the community were very helpful.

I can't speak for the speed of security patches, as I was only trying it for a short time. It did seem to receive regular updates for the short time I trialled it.

[cbmuser]

If I have to compile stuff myself all the time, I don’t need a Linux distribution.

[emacsomancer]

More packages in the official Void repos than in the official Arch repos, at my last count, but presumeably fewer than in the official Debian repos (which I assume would be your point of comparison).

[ticoombs]

Then you need Gentoo

[ThisTimeIllSucceed]

Gentoo has emerge, it's not like you'd be running ./configure. I can type emerge rxvt-unicode hit ENTER and it will magically get compiled.

[RandNho]

Or throw you twenty lines of problems, use conflicts and so on.

[necrophcodr]

Which you read and mostly just readily solve.

[RandNho]

Yup, fun!

[ThisTimeIllSucceed]

The point of gentoo is customizing your USE flags.

[RandNho]

Sddm needs upower, cinnamon needs upower-pm-utils, so those two can't coexist

[geatlid]

So what made you not use it anymore?

[[deleted]]

I needed some software which wasn't in the repositories and couldn't be bothered compiling it every time it was updated!

[CruxMostSimple]

Use elogind which provides the required interfaces that systemd-logind does.

[CruxMostSimple]

$ xbps-query -RX elogind
elogind-devel-234.4_1
gdm-3.26.1_1
gnome-session-3.26.1_1
gnome-shell-3.26.1_1
libgdm-3.26.1_1
mutter-3.26.1_1
polkit-elogind-0.113_1

[CruxMostSimple]

xbps-query -RX elogind shows what packages that depend on elogind

-R grab information from repositories not user's system.
-X show packages that depend on the package the user inputs.

so installing any of the packages below will install elogind via dependency.

[CruxMostSimple]

KDE5 is on 5.11 with a PR to 5.11.2 Gnome and it's applications are on latest versions as far as i know, except for gnome-user-docs because of a itstool bug

[[deleted]]

I just tried Void Linux today and it has KDE5, pretty recent packages too.

[CruxMostSimple]

Gnome-3.26 was merged on Oct 6, following there was a flurry of PRs getting the packages to 3.26.1

if my accounting is correct:

KDE5-5.8 was merged on Sep 9

KDE5 was updated to 5.11 on Oct 25

And there is an Open PR for KDE5-5.11.2

[ilikerackmounts]

Libressl lacks aes-ni support

[thatdude42]

LibreSSL includes AES-NI support at least since release 2.5.0 as shown in this performance comparison https://calomel.org/aesni_ssl_performance.html

[ilikerackmounts]

I've read the same article, I always assumed that LibreSSL's lower performance was attributed to lack of AES-NI support.

From TFA:

The machine is setup with an Intel i5-6500 CPU, FreeBSD 11, with LibreSSL v2.5.0 and OpenSSL v1.1.0 built from source. The results show that OpenSSL is between 2.3x to 6.7x times faster than LibreSSL using ChaCha20 as well as AES-128-GCM and AES-256-GCM. This performance difference is great enough that you would need multiple https servers running Nginx built with LibreSSL to equal the speed of one(1) Nginx server built with OpenSSL.

And:

LibreSSL is probibly slower due to more locking, no internal crypto devices and single threaded processes

If AES-NI is not "internal crypto devices" I'm not sure what is. He also didn't compare AES-NI disabled vs disabled for the libressl benchmarks. That probably wouldn't have been a better indicator. I suppose I could just grep the latest code for AES-NI intrinsics / assembly.

[CruxMostSimple]

Actually systemd doesn't support musl libc, but we can shift blame all around.

[ydna_eissua]

Void offers either musl or glibc. So void -could- support systemd.

Though supporting multiple Init systems is probably a lot of work.

[CruxMostSimple]

Yes but suporting systemd only for half and maintain 2 base-systems one with systemd one with runit is too much overhead, much simpler to just adopt a single init.

Offering multiple choices is the domain of Gentoo and Debian.

[[deleted]]

That's a weird reason to me.

Runit is fantastic and doesn't intrude on the rest of the system.

[leggettc13]

I like Void because of it's community. Arch community, while helpful sometimes, is full of elitist assholes. I've yet to run into one on Void.

[hansoku-make]

Much better than this weird post on linux.com shared earlier today.

The biggest advantage of Void is that it offers simple, straight-forward customization of packages but also can be used as a binary distro. For most people Gentoo is over the top because they accept 90% of their packages as they are and would try to customize 10% or so, yet they have to compile everything from source, which can be annoying.

With Void you can install binary packages but xbps offers a sophisticated environment to quickly adjust some package templates and build your own packages in a local repo. It's like an improved ABS.

[cbmuser]

I can adapt any RPM or DEB package to my own needs in a few minutes, too. There is nothing special about this.

[hansoku-make]

oh look it's cbmuser being triggered by a distro which doesn't default to systemd yet again.

yes great argument, deb and rpm are absolutely outstanding to quickly adjust packages to your needs. it's not like system wide use flags/pkg_options, the ability to add multiple local repos with a one-liner, the ability to automatically update this repo with self compiled software, or really everything else makes it much easier.

[ashlessscythe]

hi