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. Also - 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 ;)