Void Linux

2026-09-14

For the past few weeks or so, I've been trying to become more intentional with how I interact with computers in general, as my examinations are coming up, and I realised that I needed to rely on a new workflow to keep up with the demands that came with examinations.

I was told about this distribution called "Void Linux" a while ago, and thought nothing of it. At that time, all I knew was that it was a minimal, simple distribution which doesn't do much for you, which didn't really catch my attention until now.

As a result of its minimal nature, I chose to hop away from the notoriously feature-rich NixOS in favour of Void Linux - choosing the musl libc variant over the glibc variant. The installer was quite simple, prompting me for basic details such as my timezone, locale of choice, username, and more - which streamlined the installation by quite a bit. Furthermore, I was pleasantly surprised by the large variety of filesystems I was allowed to choose from. It ranged from basic options like ext4 to more niche, more specialised options like XFS. I personally opted for F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System), as I heard that it had incredibly quick write speeds on SSDs and allowed you to increase the lifespan of your SSD, as it was specifically designed for SSDs.

After I completed the installation, I was booted into the TTY, as with any other DIY/minimal distribution. Setting up essential services such as seatd and dbus was fine and dandy, as Runit (Void Linux's init system) made setting services simple and coherent (the process is just symlinking a directory in /etc/sv to /var/service). For my choice of graphical sessions, I initially chose swindle as my compositor of choice, but it soon frustrated me, as its feature-rich nature drifted my attention away from productive work - hence why I deliberately chose to restrict myself by switching to yawc, which vastly improved my workflow, as its stacking layout and simplicity removed unnecessary distractions from my graphical session.

XBPS as a package manager is nearly perfect for my needs. It installed packages and their dependencies and it did them well, ensuring that my productivity was never halted by having to fix my system (unlike a certain package manager.

All in all, my experience on Void Linux was rather pleasant, without any significant flaws that I would like to nitpick or ramble on about - 10/10 distribution, would reinstall