Entering the Void - My Experience Installing Void Linux

Void Linux is a BSD type Linux distro. I was intrigued by its smaller user base and the fact that I’ve never tried a BSD-oriented distro before. It’s different from other distros by a couple of things:

Benefits and Drawbacks of Void

Aside from having a cool name, what is Void used for? Well, it has a couple of quirks:

  1. runit - runit is a different init system from systemd. It’s more modern, faster, and effective than systemd. This makes Void even more minimal than Arch, as runit has significantly less code than systemd!

  2. xbps - xbps (X Binary Package System) is the Void package manager. It’s extremely fast and is generally regarded as a very good package manager. It takes a bit of configuring, as the default mirror is all the way in Germany (spoiler alert: I’m not German). It does lack some more proprietary packages, where xbps-src comes in as an extension of xbps-install. You also have third-party tools like xdeb to install Debian .deb packages, which is very nice.

  3. muscl - muscl is also available to be used and is a nice addition and option instead of glibc, though I didn’t use it to avoid dealing with programs not working from it.

The Installation

I decided to go with the base ISO to get the true Minimalist Experience (TM). I had practiced installing and setting up KDE Plasma in a virtual machine, so I knew what I had to do - in theory, anyways. After flashing the ISO to a drive using Rufus (I had some issues with DD on Linux), I booted to the live environment and the welcoming arms of tty1. Void has a nice terminal-gui installer. It runs in a tty, but isn’t a real graphical interface.