 One of the distros that I've never taken a look at and made a video on is Void Linux and I tried about a year and a half ago or so to make a video about Void Linux. It was one of my first planned long term reviews. I was going to install Void. I was going to live in it for a month and it was going to be an amazing experience but I could not get that thing to install at that point. Now remember a year and a half ago I was a much bigger Linux noob than I am now. I'm still a Linux noob but I'm more informed than I once was. So I thought it was high time to take a look at Void Linux again. So today what I'm going to do is talk about my first impressions of Void Linux. I've been using it now for two days and if you follow me on Mastodon you'll have gotten a little bit of a sneak peek over what I'm going to say today. Now most of those toots have been overly negative about Void Linux so I do have many positive things to say. And we'll talk about those as we go along. So first off let's talk about what Void Linux is because when I first heard about Void Linux I like I think a lot of people do assumed that it was an Arch Linux derivative. It's not. It's not anything really to do with Arch Linux itself. It is an independent distro that has its own package manager and all that stuff. Basically what it is is a distro that focuses on minimalism as much as possible and divorcing itself from system D. It uses its own init system. It uses run it and it is very, very minimal but it's also very arch like and we're going to talk about that as we go through this video. So the first thing that I always like to do in these first impressions videos is to talk about who this thing is for because I think one of the most important things when it comes to a distro is kind of understanding who should use it and who shouldn't use it. Void Linux is not a new user distro. It is much more complex and less well documented than Arch Linux is and we wouldn't say Arch is a new user distro. So this is even further than Arch in terms of the ability for brand new users to actually use it. Now it's not marketed for new users so that's not a hit on it. It's just if you are a brand new to Linux user Void is probably not for you unless you're very interested in learning basically everything from scratch. I would also go so far as to say that it's not really for Ubuntu or Fedora users. Those are you who are mostly like me who enjoy a graphical installer who like to have their distros basically all set up and ready to go out of the box. If that's the type of person you are, Void is also probably not for you. However, if you are an Arch based user, if you like to install vanilla arch or if you like to install Gen 2 or something like that or Artix or something like that, you would probably like Void because it's very much like those. You install this thing from a incurses installer and you build it up from the ground up and it's all you you get to choose basically everything. And when you start using it, you basically have to put in all the building blocks to make your system functional. If that's the type of thing you like to do, Void is a good option for you. So that's kind of who Void Linux is for and who it's not for. So let's go ahead and move on to my experiences. So like I said, about a year and a half ago, I tried to do this and I could not get it to install properly on my machine. Some of that has to do with the fact that light DM, which comes with the XFC version of Void Linux does not like my computer. It never has. I don't know why and it doesn't matter what distro. If the distro uses light DM or a variation of light DM, it will install fine and then it will get to the part where it should load the display manager and nothing. You just get a blank screen sometimes with a blinking cursor up in the upper left hand corner. That happened to me this time as well, but I was able to get into a TTY and start X and all that stuff. So I've been able to work around that and it's been an OK experience. So that was the first thing that I kind of had to deal with after I got installed. But before I talk about that, I kind of skipped around. Let's talk about the installation itself because the installation, as I said, is done through an incurses like installer and it is not well documented. So if you look at the Void Linux documentation, there is documentation there. But some of the steps have like one single paragraph over what you're supposed to do. So specifically when it's talking about like the partitions and how you're supposed to make the partitions, it has many assumptions built into their documentations that you know how to do to do those things. And if you don't know how to do those things, that documentation is not going to be very helpful for you. It's not a very well documented process. The whole installation is kind of like that. It does step by step and it will give you any places to watch out for in what you're supposed to do, but it doesn't really tell you how to do it. Now, again, this is where the whole not for new users thing, it really comes in. If you are a brand new user and you've never installed arch Linux before, Void is going to be even more confusing because at least arch has the arch wiki and arch wiki is the most detailed wiki out there, maybe outside of the Gen 2 wiki. So if you're in the situation where you've never done any of the stuff like partitioning your drives through F disk or CF disk, if you've never had to set up your own UEFI partitions and all that stuff, this is going to be very, very confusing. And the void documentation is not going to get you any further into the process. For me personally, the installation was fairly easy simply because I've I've installed arch Linux before. So I know how to partition my drives and all that stuff. I would have liked a little bit more documentation over, you know, like what sizes I'm supposed to make certain partitions, where things are supposed to be mounted and all this stuff. I can't even imagine if I decided to do like sub volumes with butterfaster or anything like that. If I decided to do that, it would have been way more complicated and way over my head. So for me personally, it was an OK experience. There were several parts where I kind of had to guess and I thought for sure I was doing the thing wrong, but it ended up OK in the end. And honestly, that was the biggest shock of this whole thing. The installer worked and installed properly, installed on the right drive, installed with the right partitions. All the partitions were mounted in the place where they're supposed to be. It worked out fine. But I don't I give that credit to myself and not to the documentation. I was able to intuitively get through it, simply based on prior experience. But if I hadn't had that experience, I would have been screwed. So the installation is going to be hit or miss, depending on your experience. If you have a lot of experience installing things like arts, gen two, artics, things like that, you're going to probably be fine. If you've never installed any of those other distros, you're going to have a little bit harder time, specifically around partitioning and stuff like that. It couldn't get a little dicey. So that's the installation. Now, once I had it installed, I had that display manager problem that I still haven't been able to fix. But other than that, I was able to get into a TTY. I was able to install I3 and all of my programs that go along with I3. I was able to create an X and an RC file and I was able to get into I3. And it looks like this. So after I've done some of my racing, this is what VoidLinux looks like. So you can see here that I'm actually using VoidLinux on hardware. And it looks, you know, like I3 and it works fairly fairly well. I did make a small boo boo when I installed. I only installed I3 and not I3 gaps. So I had to remove the lines for gaps in my configuration file, but that's not a big deal. That was my boo boo. But other than that, it worked really well in terms of the software availability to get to this point. It has been mostly good. I say mostly good because it doesn't have proprietary software. So if you're going to want things like Chrome or you want things like Discord or something like that, you're going to have to download those from somewhere else, at least from my experience so far. Those things aren't available. And that's fine because there are a lot of distributions that don't have that kind of stuff in their repos outside of that, though, the software availability has been actually fairly good. So it has things like the ZSH auto suggestions are there. ZSH syntax highlighting was in the repositories. EXA was there. Rofi, Dmenu, Alacrity was there. So you get the idea. Basically, everything that I could possibly want outside of the proprietary stuff was in the repositories. And most of it was fairly recent software. I don't think that there was anything that was incredibly old. I did have some issues with some Python stuff. I don't think that that was a verging problem so much as it was a just a weird Python thing. So, for example, Ranger, which is my preferred terminal file manager would not launch at the beginning. So I had to uninstall it and reinstall it and it worked fine. I did install Python 3 before I reinstalled it. So maybe that's what's what fixed it, but it works now. And it was a fairly easy solve. So that was one place that I had a problem with some Python programs just to not load. And basically, that's the story of my experience post install is that there's been one problem right after another that I had to solve. So the Python thing was one of them. Another thing was that I couldn't get any flat packs to launch. So I installed flat pack because I wanted to just get all my normal applications through there, specifically the proprietary ones and also audacity and OBS. Those are usually things that I use through flat pack and flat hub. So I installed flat pack, enabled flat hub through the repo link and then restart my computer, downloaded the discord and OBS and audacity. Those are the three that I needed and discord wouldn't launch. And I was like, I mean, at this point, I had suffered through a whole bunch of other problems. And I'll talk about those here in a minute. But it had an error. So I launched it through the terminal and showed me what the error was. And I was like, another problem that I had to fix. But so I googled it and I was able to find fairly quickly that I needed to add this right here to my excellent RC. Basically, this just runs a D bus session. And that allowed all my flat packs to start working. So that was another problem that I had to kind of overcome. And it's not something that happens when you install I3 on, say Fedora or Ubuntu, that stuff's all settled because it is included as part of the distro. The D bus stuff and the running of the D bus services and stuff like that isn't doesn't happen automatically on void. So you have to do that yourself. So that was again, another problem that I had to fix. Another problem that I had to fix was one that I actually still haven't fixed. And that is that the file picker isn't included in void. At least this version of void is not included. So I installed the KDE file picker, which is XDG portal KDE or something like that. And it works system wide, except for in Firefox. I cannot get Firefox to bring up the file picker. I'm not sure why I still haven't solved that problem. Another issue that I had earlier on was I was going through an install in logging into all of my stuff in Firefox. And one of the things that I use up here is Bitward. And I use Bitwarden for my authenticator as well. So it does all of my 2FA stuff. And, you know, I tried to sign into Firefox itself so I could get everything synced and it told me that the 2FA code was wrong. I was like, what do you mean it's wrong? It's coming straight from Bitwarden. Of course, it's right. It can't possibly be wrong. So, you know, I tried it a couple of times just figuring that I was missing the time frame or whatever. And the code kept expiring or whatever, you know, something like that. No, it turns out that the system clock was wrong. So if your system clock isn't exactly right, your 2FA authenticator won't work. It won't generate the proper codes or something like that. So it was actually like six hours behind or I think that put me at right at UTC or something like that. So that was a problem. And it wasn't simply like I used the wrong time zone or something like that, or that the hardware clock was even wrong because the hardware clock was right. It was the NTP, which is the service that synchronizes the clock wasn't installed. So I had to install NTP and then I had to figure out how to start NTP. And that was the whole process because I'd never actually used run it before. I've used OpenRC and I've used Sysvian NIT, but I've never used run it before. So that was an experience and a half. So that took a good 45 to minutes to an hour for me to get the clock up and running. So that was another problem I had. So I feel like I'm just bitching and bitching and bitching above Void Linux. And part of it is I am. I'm I had a fantastic journey, trying to get my system up and running to the point where I felt comfortable making a video about it, but also to the point where I could actually use my system to make a video. And I'm at that point now, but it took quite a while and there was problem after problem. Now I call these problems because really their problems for me simply because I can search for them and I can do the troubleshooting and figure out how to do them and I can put a call out on Mastodon for help if I need to, which I did several times. Several people helped me. Outside of that, I call these problems, but they're not really problems. It's a process is what it is. Void Linux requires you to build your system from ground zero all the way up to a functioning system. It's just like Arch Linux in that way. You have to when you install Arch Linux, you start out with the barest essentials, basically the kernel and very little else. You know, you probably get in Arch Linux, you'll get system D and all the stuff that makes your system function. But you're not going to get things like X or or any of that stuff. You have to install all that stuff after you've installed Arch and Void is exactly the same. You have to go along the process of building yourself a sustainable and working system. That's just the way it works. It's not a issue. It's not a bug. It's not a something even to complain about. It's just the way that Void works. And if you're a patient, if you're a patient person and you have the ability to encounter these problems and then go search out the solutions, you're going to be perfectly happy and void probably, you know, it's going to be it can be frustrating at times because anytime you discover something that's not working the way you expect it to work and you have to solve the issue, you know, that can be frustrating. But as long as you're patient with it and are willing to go do the work in order to find the solutions or get the help, Void is going to be a fine thing for you. But the problem is I'm not a patient man. You know, I never have been. If it doesn't work right now, it's broken. Obviously it's broken. I'm going to nuke and pave and move on. And that's not going to be an OK point of view when you're dealing with Void or Arch or Gentoo or something that you have to be very, very patient and very, very willing to put in the work that it's going to take in order to make that system functional. And like I said, I'm not usually that type of guy. And here's the thing is I'm much less. That kind of guy now than I was, say, six months ago, when I was an arch user or even arch based distro user, I was much more interested, much more capable of being patient enough to actually solve the problems that would pop up when you use that type of distro. Since I've moved to Fedora, where things just work, they're everything's done basically for you. I don't know if I've gotten more lazy, more incompetent, which is possible. You know, I don't know what it is, but getting into Void was a shock to my system. There was a period over the last two days, which is basically the whole time where I just moved from problem to problem to problem to problem. And if in one of the at one point I tooted out I unmasked it on I posted, why does anybody use this garbage? I did that. You can go check it out. Links in the video description. I actually did. I was like, why would anybody put themselves through this? Because it's just one problem right after another. But as I've thought about it more, they're not problems. It's just, again, it's a process. It's something that everyone who uses Void will have to go through. Now, if you've used Void for a long time and you know how to set up your system, you know, you have a checklist of things here. You have to do this. You have to get your debug session running. You have to install NTP. You have to install NTFS 3G. If you have an NTFS drive, you know, you have to do all of these things. It's a process just like it is with Arch. It's, you know, do one right after another. And if you do them all right at install, your system is going to be working right when you start using it. If you don't do those things or you don't know to do those things, that's when it becomes a, oh, I just encountered my external hard drives won't mount. Why? Because I don't have NTFS 3G installed. So, you know, I have to go do that. And, you know, I get that problem solved. Oh, my file picker is not working. So I have to go figure that out. You know, flat packs aren't launching. I have to go figure that out. You know, it's, it's, uh, there are only problems feeling like that when they're all spread out. And it feels like they come right right after another. But if you went through the checklist, if you knew to go through the checklist, then you would not have any of the issues that I had. So at the end of the day, my experience with Void has been exactly the experience with Void most people would have if they've used it for the first time and don't know what they're doing. And I freely admit that I don't know what I'm doing. The documentation I found found pretty lacking in some places. So most of my fixing and stuff like that came from either Googling or just hit or miss, you know, remembering things from other systems like the NTFS 3G part, which is the thing that I needed in order for my external hard drives to mount. I didn't go searching for that. I knew that that had to be installed. But I didn't remember that it had to be installed. Like I knew it because it's the same thing happens with ARCH. You have to install that in order for it to work. Same thing with Gentoo. You have to install that in order for NTFS drives to mount. So, you know, I remembered that eventually and then fixed it, right? Other things I had to search for. So, like I said, the the process is very, very similar to ARCH. If you've used ARCH links before or Gentoo or something like that or something where you have to build from the ground up, Void is a excellent option for you. And software ability was very good as well. The other thing that I want to talk about a little bit is the package manager. So keep in mind that I am still very early days when it comes to this. So I don't know everything about this package manager. So we're just kind of I'm going to show you the things that I do know. So first of all, the number one thing that you're going to know other than I need to know how to spell pseudo XB, XBPS dash install and XBPS dash remove. Again, if you can spell them. So those are the two that I learned right away. The install obviously installs things, the remove thing, remove things. So those those are the two that I've learned so far. Obviously, I still need to learn what the process is for actually updating the system. I haven't gotten around to that yet. It's just been installed for two days. So I'm not that worried about it. But when I do decide to update, I'll need to figure that out. There are other things like search that I still don't know. So the biggest issue that I've had so far with the package manager is that the documentation is fragmented. So XBPS install has its own man page. XBPS remove has its own man page. So as far as I'm aware, XBPS itself doesn't have its own man page, which is kind of infuriating because even if it was just a list of all the other man pages that have to do with XBPS, that'd be awesome. But it's not here. So I'm going to have to look that up when I need to do the other, you know, learn how to update not stuff. So the fact that there's not a just like a general XBPS man page, at least from what I can see is kind of weird for me. I just don't really understand it. And I would like to understand why that that's not a thing because it definitely it feels like it should be like XBPS is the package manager. XBPS install is not the package manager. It's a subsection. It's a it's a script or something. I don't know. But it's it feels like there should not be these segmented man pages. They just kind of bothers me. Anyways, that's another thing that I've still need to learn about. And overall, I don't really prefer the way it does package manager. I know a lot of people like this particular way of managing packages. They really I've heard a lot of people in the void community to say while XBPS is amazing. And I'm assuming that there's going to be some feature or something like that that makes it really good that I haven't discovered yet. But initial impressions is that it's really long to type. So I immediately put it into into an alias. I mean, that's a lot of I mean, really, it's only two extra characters than like apt install. So it's not that many more characters. It just feels like there's more characters than there are in like a DNF install or apt install or something like that. It's not as if it's really actually all that much longer. It just feels that longer. Maybe it's just because it's weird to type. So XBPS, those letters are all over the place, right? XB are on the bottom row. If you're using QWERTY, P is on the top row, S is in the middle. It's all kind of it's a two handed operation. Now, again, there are other package managers that are the same way. I'm just used to those. So this is taking a little bit. I mean, X is not a common letter in a package manager. So that's still it's just it feels weird to complain about. But it feels weird to type. That's my point. Stupid, I know, but it's my point. So overall, my first impressions of Void is that it's usable if you're willing to go through the process. Now that I've gone through most of the process and I believe that I've kind of solved all of the issues that I was having. It's a very functional system. And now my next task is going to figure out why it's supposedly so good. So I hear a lot of people say Void is a fantastic distro. And I'm not doubting that. I just need to that's my next task over the next month, because this is going to be my next long term review. I'm going to try to answer that question. What makes Void special? Why is it so good? Is it just because it doesn't use this in deep? Because if that's the only reason I'm going to be highly disappointed because there are many other distros out there that don't use this in D. You know, I could use MX Linux, I could use Artix, I could use Dev one. You know, there are many different distros out there that don't use system D. And if that's the only reason why Void has its claim to fame, then like I said, I'm going to be a little bit disappointed. If it's because of the XBPS stuff, I'm going to have to discover why that is. If there's some other reason, again, I'm going to have to discover what those reasons are because somebody out there is shouting at their camera right now, Matt, Void is amazing. You should use it and make a really good review of it. And I'm going to try and I'm going to put my effort into actually using the system and seeing what's special about it. And that will come up in my long term review. So if you're interested in that long term review, make sure you subscribe. They'll come around probably a month from now. So just make sure you hit the subscribe button and hit that bell icon so you get notified when I post a new video, which I do most days. So I appreciate that. If you have subscribed, if you haven't yet, what are you waiting for? I should say hashtag YouTuber. So smash that like button, all that stuff. Anyways, that is it for this video. If you have thoughts on Void, if you've used Void before, or if you haven't used Void before, I'd love to hear from you in the comment section below. You can follow me on Massive on our Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcash. Just like all these fine people. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.