• Cris@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    Frankly I’d much rather have void. Super cool distro, a lot of things about it seem like an ideal fit for me, I just don’t really have the technical skill to get a minimal distro all set up the way I want it

    Plus their logo is pretty. Which shouldn’t matter but like, look at it- it’s a cool logo!

    • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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      11 days ago

      Yes, the install process is difficult to perform. But once you do it, you’ll feel like a wizard. You learn so much from the process if you do a manual chroot install. It helps you understand how the installation process for other distros like Debian works. If you have some free time, I would recommend trying it in a virtual machine.

      • Cris@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        I tried when I set up my new laptop and definitely learned a ton, but eventually stalled at getting network manager setup so I could use GNOME settings to configure networks, and getting sound set up

        I completely forgot about trying it in a VM, I may have to go give that a try!

        If it had package kit implementation so I could use a graphical package manager/app store it’d basically be my perfect distro if I could get it set up the way I want. An independent distro, super elegant, if I understand right the packages are all vanilla, “stable rolling release”. I really like it, a minimal distro is just a bit beyond me skill-wise, and I’d miss having a way to browse native (non-flatpak) applications graphically

        • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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          11 days ago

          Sorry to hear about the network manager issues! I could be wrong on this, but I think Gnome is not the best supported DE in void - possibly because of how heavily tied it is to systemd. I wish I could help, but I still configure my wifi using wpa_supplicant.conf. Maybe dbus wasn’t setup properly?

          Regarding audio, the pipewire documentation for Void is pretty good. It’s pretty thematic of the whole Void linux experience: you have to read the handbook and follow its steps closely, but it’s very well written and easy to understand. It can definitely be time-consuming as well though.

          Void is definitely all the things you mentioned. I installed it on a few machines, the first in early 2020 and it has never given me an issue. Extremely stable and boring. I’m impressed that it has so many packages in its repository, but that’s a testament to how well xbps is written. But there are a few things missing since it’s fair from the mainstream, including packagekit. I had never heard of it before you mentioned it - I found a fork on github to support it, but it doesn’t look very well maintained.

  • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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    11 days ago

    As one of the dozens of Void Linux users, I too find this very offensive!

    (But hey, at least we’re getting some attention, which is nice…)

  • Katzenmann@feddit.org
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    11 days ago

    You’re using the meme wrong. The “at home” needs to be worse than the “mom can we get?”

  • ngn@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

    the only thing void has over arch is more architecture support (which is kinda ironic)

      • ngn@lemmy.ml
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        10 days ago

        that kinda depends on your personal experience - for example ive been running arch for 2 years, i do weekly updates and ive never encountered a single issue

  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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    11 days ago

    Haha now I kinda feel like this is Endeavour. I’m really liking Endeavour! It feels like Arch but just a bit smoother of an approachability curve. Lovely community, too.

    I should mess with Void sometime. 🤔

    • 0x4E4F@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      10 days ago

      It’s more like Arch than Endeavour though, just a heads up. Very little GUI things, especially the installer and all that. Well, the installed is TUI, so It’s not that hard to be honest.

    • 0x4E4F@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      10 days ago

      Rolling release and stable. And no systemd… not by choice though, they’re not purists, you just can’t build it for musl.

      • nesc@lemmy.cafe
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        10 days ago

        Musl and stable is one worst word combinations there is. I still have nighmares from broken packages under alpine that worked just fine under normal distro. It took us like a week to find the problem. Bad times.

          • renzev@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            It’s not their official policy, but my personal philosophy with alpine goes like this:

            1. If it doesn’t work with musl/busybox, find an alternative that does
            2. If I can’t find an alternative, then I patch it myself
            3. If I don’t have the time/skill to patch it myself, then I throw it into a container that has glibc/gnu coreutils
        • 0x4E4F@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          10 days ago

          Yep, believe it or not, it’s probably the most stable rolling release distro out there. I’ve used it for the past 4, 5 years or so, not once has it broken.

          There are 2 main reasons why this is. One, they don’t roll with bleeding edge, they opt for stable, so cutting edge is more like it. And two, they don’t have something like the AUR. There is only the main repo and that’s it. The approval process for new packages is quite strict and it has to fulfil a lot of requirements, among which the software has to not just build, but also run on i686, x86_64, ARMv5/6/7 and ARM64. And not just on glibc, but also on musl. So basically, all that, times 2. Sometimes it may take up to a year to get new packages approved by the maintainers, depending on how big the package is and how integrated in the system it is.

          • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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            10 days ago

            The word “stable” usually means unchanging through a release. I.e. functionality of one release is the same if you stay in that release even if you update (security and bug fixes mostly). The experience of the system not doing anything unexpected like crashing is reliability. A rolling distro is by that definition not stable, but it can be more or less bug free and crash free.

            • nesc@lemmy.cafe
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              10 days ago

              No, it doesn’t the only unchanging distro is debian, and they do it mostly out of resourse constraints not because it is a good idea. Like the only lts package that debian does update is linux kernel. Everything else is patched for vulnerabilities at best, left to rot as stable as a rule.

              • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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                10 days ago

                A bold claim. RHEL updates are mostly security patches, are they doing that due to lack of resources too? Is it that hard to imagine that enterprise distros don’t want surprises from changing functionality?

                • nesc@lemmy.cafe
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                  10 days ago

                  Let’s be real, RHEL and Debian aren’t even close on what and how they give you. Better not compare them because it wouldn’t be a comparison. They mostly do security patches but when needed they actually backport features, they support every version far longer, they don’t ship packages that were outdated 20 years ago because no one can support their aging infrastructure, they actually rewritten absolute majority of oldie initscripts so you don’t need to remember how to disable an init script for a given run level, and so on.

                  After years of rhel moving to debian was like moving ten years in the past and to a very poor neighbourhood. Sorry if it offends you.

                  Edit: Anyway what I actually wanted to say in the previous post most enterprise distros aren’t religios about it, like debian is.