I currently use Manjaro as my daily driver, but it is bloatware to be honest. I want to switch to more minimalist distro so i ended up thinking on Void. So any advice? How is package manager? Community? Softwares? Documentation?
I’ve used it as a daily driver for a few years now. Here are my thoughts on it:
Stability: Generally speaking, I’ve found it to be pretty rock solid for a rolling release distro. Over the years, it’s only really broken a handful of times. Things that break tend to be the same as with any rolling release distro, e.g. pipewire came out which had no immediate impact on pulse, but over time more and more things started to require pipewire, so eventually forcing ones hand with switching.
Updates Being rolling release, everything is relatively up-to-date. The way they manage dependencies package updates with continuous integration is pretty clever and seems to help prevent things from breaking.
System Management Because of the decision to use runit, things are different from mainstream Linux distros. This isn’t bad, just keep in mind you will need to learn to use a new set of tools to manage your system. There are some bits and pieces that bridge the gap, e.g. elogind means you get systemd type session management without needing all of systemd. For system logging, you will need to use socklog instead, which is a very different beast to systemd journal and classic syslogd. For everything else, the arch wiki is very useful for finding light weight utilities to help manage things.
Package availability There are definitely a plethora of options for packages. Because of how their package infrastructure works, it is rare that a package you want isn’t available. And for those that aren’t available, it’s usually a small utility…one with an alternative that is available in the repository already.
User Contributions In void, there is no distinction between “official” and “user” contributed packages. Voids package infrastructure feels more like the AUR from the outset, but with github CI doing the heavy lifting of compiling the package for everyone once you’ve upstreamed package changes. The downside I’ve found is that the maintainers seem to be perpetually time/resource constrained. For any package changes that are moderately more complicated than “uprev package”, “fix breakages” or “new package”, I’ve found it a bit frustrating. A few years ago, I attempted to get some changes in for GHDL to enable backtraceing support, but after a few review comments, it just went silent on the maintainer side, so never got merged. After about a month of silence, github automatically closed the issue.
Documentation Their docs are pretty good for getting started. I’ve found them great for pointing out nuances and peculiarities of Void. It is definitely not as exhaustive and comprehensive as the arch wiki, but about 75-80% of the arch wiki is applicable across the board for all Linux distros anyway…
Totally agree with you.
try out void. but arch is a totally fine distro.
if you dont want to hassle with installing go with the autoscript or endeavour os. EOS outcompetes manjaro everywhere.
If you want non-bloated distro with the similarity of Arch-based, I recommend EndeavourOS. It’s pretty close to vanilla Arch.
This is the way.
I use it as my primary home machine, running bspwm. I enjoy it, and find once configured it just works. Primarily web browsing, Kicad and OpenSCAD, and some Python development.
I’m in the same boat. For a long time I was a RHEL admin at work, and ran Ubuntu at home. Three years ago my workplace switched to Ubuntu servers, and at home I switched to Manjaro. Now I’m sick of Manjaro, and want to move to something else for home use. I’ve been looking at NixOS and Void, both seem pretty cool in their own way.
Are there community packages like the arch repos? I’ve come to rely on those in Manjaro, like I rely on 3rd party PPAs in Ubuntu.
I’m curious, why are you sick of Manjaro? I’ve been use it for 2 years and it’s been smooth sailing. Genuinely just curious.
No reason, really. I’m not part of the “hate on Manjaro” club.
I got started with Manjaro because I was looking for an Arch-like experience, but with better distro management, curated packages, etc. I’ve had some of my best PC gaming experiences on Manjaro with Lutris and Proton, it is a great Linux gaming distro.The distro managers have definitely let me down more than once, most notably when they wouldn’t ship KDE Plasma 5.25 when it was released citing “stability concerns”, and then doing the same thing with Plasma 5.27. But those issues are behind us, and didn’t affect me too badly (I just needed to wait 6 weeks until the next release to get my updates). I’ve come to realise through my use of Manjaro that I actually always want to use it like Arch. Often things I want to install are not available in the Manjaro repos, but are available on AUR. Then installing from AUR sometimes depends on things that are not in Manjaro repos. It gets messy, and I should just use Arch.
But rather than moving to Arch, I think I am itching to move to something completely different, and NixOS and Void are about as different as it gets.
Excellent Package manager.
Small(er) community than what you might be used to since you’re coming from a more mainstream distribution.
Smaller selection of software available than Arch (due to AUR) but I dabble only with essentials so hasn’t bothered me. You can always compile from source.
Good documentation. It’s not at the level of Gentoo or the BSDs but good enough for anyone to get a hold on it and start learning.
No
systemd
