Void has been one of the first distros i actually used. Technically not the first. My first was KDE Neon, on which i stayed for a few months.
But i didn’t love it. I could have been distrohopping for the next several years. But i didn’t. Because after KDE Neon, i went to Void, and i never moved moved from there.
I installed Void on my current laptop on the 10th of december 2021, and there has never been any reinstall.
The distro is absurdly stable. It’s a rolling release, and yet, the worst update i had in those years was one time, gtk4 apps took a little longer to open on gnome. Which was reverted after a few hours. Not only that, i sometimes spent months without any update, and yet, whenever i did update, absolutely nothing went wrong. Granted, i pretty much only did full upgrades, and never partial upgrades, which generally help a lot. Still.
Not only that, i could reasonably easily add my own packages with xbps-src.
And there’s generally quite a lot of tools around packages in the xtools package. tools that are really really useful. You’re telling me i can just call a script with a filename/path, and it just tells me what packages have a file that match that ? That i can just list all the files in a package, wether it’s on the remote only, installed, or uninstalled but built from xbps-src ? And that i don’t need to hunt down several scripts online to do that ? Wild.
In most distros i could only ever dream of something like this.
Not only that, but the maintainers and community are generally quite friendly and helpful. At least more than the Arch community from my experience. Which is always nice.
And what about support … Well, it’s very much good enough. Still supports i686, obviously amd64, arm, aarch64, and if you’re willing to lose some convenience, then riscv64, powerpc and mipsel are also available, though, since there isn’t a build server for these, you’ll need to build packages yourself, and probably patch a few as well. Oh right, i forgot, it also supports using musl. If you don’t want to run glibc for one reason or another, musl is there as an option. Though, i can’t speak much about it, as i just use glibc myself.
Just as a bonus, the installer is generally very easy to use. Most “complex” part is about partitioning the disk, which, really isn’t that hard, especially when pretty much every handbook explains how to do it. Though you won’t use it often enough to actually see it as a benefit, which is why i put it here. It is also fully supported to install via command line, if you prefer that.
What’s this ?
I didn’t talk about the fact it doesn’t use systemd but instead uses runit ? Yeah that’s because i don’t care. That’s not why i’m using Void. Im using it for all of the above, the init system is just something that comes with it.
Will i use Void on my next computers ? Well, i might try out Gentoo on a few of them, but other than that, or if it isn’t conclusive, i will probably just default to Void.