Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

I usually refrain from distro- (and editor-, and language-) related discussions but I think Void Linux deserves an exception here:

- Everything is remarkably simple, (mostly) well-documented and straightforward.

- Friendly, dedicated and very knowledgeable community

- Open development, very few hooks to jump through if you have something to contribute

- No systemd, so: rebooting your system isn't a lottery where, if you lose, you get to wait for 90 seconds for some service to stop, your system doesn't start doing strange new things after every update because something that's been working fine since the 1980s has recently been declared broken, no binary logs to get corrupted (and no need to tweak your system and sidestep this brilliant scheme). Of course, you can't do much DevOps on Void Linux, but I'm pretty sure that's about as relevant as the fact that you can't run macOS on low-power embedded systems.

- Completely community-ran and independent. Some things don't happen as quickly as in corporate-backed projects, but you're also not beta testing for their LTS or enterprise-grade releases, either. Also, no bureaucracy, no priority mismatch, no one to shove alpha-quality software down your throat.

It's basically like OpenBSD with more drivers but based on slightly worse and less cohesive technology :-).

> Of course, you can't do much DevOps on Void Linux..

Why not? runit is really great - it's an implementation of daemontools from djb - it's a powerful system - including socket activation, log handling, you can even run custom check scripts for your services. I'd even say it's more poweful than systemd and better for devops once you go beyond systemctl enable apache2

Thanks for beating me to saying all of that. It's been my experience, too.

Void Linux has made me say a good "wow" more than any other Linux.

I love that I can use many of my favorite bits of OpenBSD, even doas.

xbps takes just a minute to learn, and is surprisingly ("wow") fast and robust.

Who knows why it's not more popular, but it doesn't matter. It's awesome.

No systemd, so [...] you can't do much DevOps on Void Linux

How so? How is DevOps linked or dependent on systemd in your view? Personally, I find systemd gets in the way of devops.

I don't understand, what can't DevOps do much without systemd where most of the DevOps culture involving around automations?

I found the question interesting as well especially since the original post mentions how michael works on void and distributimg it with ansible (many of the things he mentioned sound like devops to me)

Oh, the downvote machine works here as well...

Whenever the line between a technical discussion and a systemd bashing thread becomes blurry, someone who does DevOps for a living invariably pops up to say how much they like systemd -- usually for pretty valid reasons.

It's also ubiquitous enough that, by this point in time, some of my younger colleagues who do DevOps for a living have never used anything but systemd. Doing Stack Overflow-driven (aka copy-paste) DevOps without systemd is pretty challenging nowadays.

Hence the joke.

Otherwise, yes, of course you can do DevOps on Void. I can't imagine what you couldn't do DevOps on; I know folks who were doing it on Novell Netware before the whole thing even had a name.

Isn't devops basically an infrastructure engineering, which if anything, is as anti-systemd as it gets. I guess people think of devops as something different then.

Some people use "devops" as a derogatory term for developers copy-pasting stuff to the terminal.

Certain in-terms tend to acquire ironical undertones quite quickly, such as "agile" now meaning certified scrum masters(tm) doing half hour standups.

For me devops is summed up thus:

http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/08/true-story-fixing-a...

> if you lose, you get to wait for 90 seconds for some service to stop

Now, now, that's really down to the way you write your RC scripts. Plenty of distros over the years have had timeout-based prereq-waits in their init.d scripts.

(Heck, I currently have a prereq-wait of some kind going on in the early-stage init of a macOS system, because it happens to contain a non-Apple-manufactured NVMe SSD formatted as APFS. Seems like TRIMing APFS volumes gets deferred to boot-time.)

90 seconds? You're lucky. I have machines running systemd (RHEL 7) that simply will not reboot unless I use the --force option. They will just sit there with a blank screen forever otherwise.

Not only no systemd; Void uses runit, which is systemd's service management principles done The Unix Way™.

    you can't do much DevOps on Void Linux

Why is that ???

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671791

I can't edit my post anymore :-)

This is that case where you needed a smiley after the joke. I thought when you said that, that the reason was that it used a too simplistic init system a la OpenWRT, where you can’t check if the process is running, automatically restart daemons, etc.

but you can check if the process is running and automatically restarting supervised services is the norm.

The norm for what exactly? There are very simplistic init systems out there that do not supervise anything, and every daemon must come with its in shell script that checks if it is running. Without looking, I don’t know what Void does and the original comment here didn’t make it clear.

Considering every major init system ( and process supervisor ) since IBM Aix in has process supervision and auto-restarting to some degree then yes.

Void Linux uses runit a descedent of djb's daemontools which does automatically restart services and provides a way to check if it's running by starting the daemons themselves and keeping them as direct childs.

Another nice feature is first class support for ZFS.

Whoa - that is a pretty big item. Thanks for mentioning that. One of my todos this year is to check out encrypted ZFS on Linux. I will try that on Void.

I've been running encrypted ZFS on Void for about a year. [Only caveat: I wasn't able to get an encrypted ZFS root working on Void (there is some issue with grub+luks+zfs), but I have system with an unencrypted ZFS root with an encrypted /home on ZFS.]

I am so glad to hear encrypted ZFS is stable and working. Thanks for sharing that.

> something that's been working fine since the 1980s has recently been declared broken

Void Linux uses runit, which was released in 2004, so I guess they agree.

runit is an implementation of djb daemontools - http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/daemontools/blabbyd.html - the latest release is from 2001 - so this must be around since the early/mid 90ies - it's also what systemd copied to a degree also solaris / launchd got some inspiration from daemontools.

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