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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

I just installed Void Linux a VM.

My first impression is that it feels really snappy. I am not sure if I like the cli interface of the package manager. But I will give this one a try.

Can someone share their experiences regarding Void's stability? I am currently using openSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop and primary laptop, and while I am mostly happy, things sometimes kind of break after installing a batch of updates.

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I used Void on my previous laptop for about a year with no stability issues. The only reason I stopped using it was because I wanted to experiment with a no-grub EFI stub booted whole disk encryption using LUKS non-systemd setup, which I only really had an idea of how to do on Gentoo, so I went back to that. [Edit: I think I might have almost had this working on Void, in fact, but there was some piece that I couldn't get right, if I remember, but that I could do more easily in Gentoo. But I can't remember what that might have been. It's been a while since I did that.]

Otherwise, I probably would have stayed with Void for a while more. It was pretty nice.

Anecdote: I've used Void for a few years, and I have had it break exactly once that I recall. That one time was filesystem issues[0], fixed by fsck.

[0] Not sure what caused it; F2FS may have been less stable than I thought, or the cheap SSD might have lost a bit.

I recently tried a number of Linux distros to get specific GNU tooling for an embedded project I'm working on. (My daily driver is OpenBSD.) The Void philosophy is very appealing to me compared to most other Linux distros. I tried both Void with glibc and with musl. Both of them would install ok but then immediately panic on rebooting, and I didn't spend the time and effort to get past that to find out whether it would be stable once I got it running.

I love Void, but I personally find that Arch is much better supported overall in terms of packages and the AUR. I haven't tried Void recently though so maybe I should give it another go and help contribute.

I have been using it for now two years, and my only problem so far was a bad default umask with fish shell which wrongly set root-only permission on package search. Fixed with the correct umask in my fishrc.

Oh, and steam can't remember to keep me logged, but I'd probably blame Valve rather than void for this (very minor) inconvenience.

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