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Void Linux
- cgb223 9y agoWhat is the motivation for supporting MIPS here? I can't think of a single system that runs MIPS instructions. Also, what does this distro do differently from the other 1000+ distos? Why VOID? Why not something else?
- lmz 9y agoCheap wireless routers?
- nialv7 9y agoFor one, VOID has a unique package management system [1]. [1]: https://www.voidlinux.eu/usage/xbps/ https://www.voidlinux.eu/usage/xbps/
- cwyers 9y agoWhy is that a good thing? There's network effects to package managers. Using one of the common ones is beneficial.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoIt's very easy to write templates for new packages and the maintainers stay really busy, so I've found that void has more packages in the main repo than almost anything else, despite its lesser popularity.
- da02 9y agoI'm guessing they looked at other package managers, didn't like a bunch of decisions, and decided to write their own: XBPS claims it's totally compatible with POSIX/SUSv2/C99 standards, and released with a Simplified BSD license (2 clause). Other features: https://wiki.voidlinux.eu/XBPS#Features https://wiki.voidlinux.eu/XBPS#Features
- PrimHelios 9y agoFrom what I've read, Void was created as a testing distro for XBPS before it was merged into a BSD. Might be wrong on that though.
- daptaq 9y agoI don't think any *BSD uses xbps - sadly.
- PrimHelios 9y agoHuh, I guess not. Strange, I could've sworn I read somewhere that was the case.
- feelin_googley 9y agoIt is written somehwere that this was the motivation for creating this Linux distribution. The author wanted to work on his own package manager. What makes this "distro" more interesting than all the others IMHO is that the author is a former BSD committer.
- KGIII 9y agoNo systemd. Some folks will appreciate that.
- sddfd 9y agoGentoo also doesn't force systemd.
- kogepathic 9y agoDevuan also, although their initial release took ages...
- krylon 9y agoWell, Debian has been known to take their time with releases, as well. One might say the Devuan developers just uphold an honored tradition. ;-) (Just to be clear, the resulting releases have - for me at least - usually been worth waiting for.)
- tyingq 9y agoA very large number of home routers run Broadcom MIPS processors.
- userbinator 9y agoNot just Broadcom, but plenty of other networking SoCs use MIPS --- and in big-endian mode too. They're probably the only commonly encountered BE systems today.
- _pmf_ 9y ago> They're probably the only commonly encountered BE systems today. Freescale's embedded PowerPC (e500 et. al) controllers are used in automotive powertrain ECUs (those that do not use TriCore), though it's debatable whether this counts as common.
- tyingq 9y agoIBM mainframes are big endian. You might say commonly encountered, depends on what circles you run in.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoIt's basically what people imagine arch as (minimal), with a BSD influence, and it's modern and supported. If you've gotten addicted to Free/OpenBSD, it might make linux palatable to you.
- da02 9y agoI was drawn to it because it doesn't use systemd. (There seem to be a lot of people who dislike systemd.) Void uses runit instead of systemd. This has made it (for me at least) easier to use than Arch/systemd. It was also one of the first to adopt LibreSSL. The main downside for me is I have to manually install browsers. Void's packages for desktop software is sometimes out-of-date. But, I'm willing to overlook it because of all the other positives.
- nine_k 9y ago(Writing this from a Void Linux installation:) I don't know about Chromium, but Firefox 55 was no more than a week late, which I can totally live with.
- da02 9y agoYou're correct. In the past the Firefox updates were very late sometimes (based an anecdotes I've read), but the situation has improved and should keep improving as more people adopt Void. (I manually install Google Chrome and Opera. It's difficult for package managers to maintain them because of licensing and other issues.)
- bugmen0t 9y agoIf you download a Mozilla build of Firefox into somewhere user-writable, like ~/opt/, it will update itself.
- JohnZi 9y agoChromium is mostly outdated since none of the Void maintainers really uses it and want to maintain it.
- JdeBP 9y agoOf course, systemd is not the only option on Arch nowadays. * https://framagit.org/taca/archnosh https://framagit.org/taca/archnosh
- da02 9y ago
- v4n4d1s 9y agoI met Richard Stallman in 2013. He used a Lemote Yeelong which was powered by a MIPS Loongson CPU.
- 0footprint 9y agoYes, what's funny about that is that is a Chinese designed processor which at first refused to pay royalties to MIPS. FYI for whoever: MIPS (the company) had major financial issues and was purchased by Imagination tech in 2013. But their patents ended up with a group of companies, including some which went to ARM. MIPS as at one point the fastest CPUs (from a millions instructions per seconds stand point) you could buy, and were in high-end SGI boxes.
- bitwize 9y agoI saw him recently. He is using a ThinkPad these days, probably one of those refurbed and reflashed ones with a free BIOS.
- icebraining 9y agoYeap. Thinkpad X60, running libreboot and Trisquel: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- digi_owl 9y agoIn large part because someone stole his bag, computer and all.
- 0footprint 9y agoApparently you aren't familiar with high end routers and network accelerator hardware.
- askvictor 9y agoI have a 'smart' TV running Android that has a mips processor.
- opk 9y agoThe motivation comes down to little more than a couple of the main Void developers owning a witiboard. Perhaps there's other hardware floating around but there was quite a bit of discussion on IRC surrounding the witi.
- nialv7 9y agoForgot to mention: void also provides musl linked binaries for all packages. So kinda like Alpine, but you can choose between glibc and musl.
- pmarin 9y agocrappy routers.
- daptaq 9y agoSane defaults.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rohshall 9y agoIf only it had a good documentation like that of Arch Linux, i would have given it a try. It seems promising, marriage of simplicity of BSD systems, and configurability and availability of vast number of packages of Linux.
- djsumdog 9y agoI use Void on my router: http://penguindreams.org/blog/building-a-thin-itx-router/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/building-a-thin-itx-router/ It works really well. Runit is an interesting init system. I wish it was a little better documented. I hope we start seeing hosted providers offering Void base images. I'm a little weary of the current state of Linux distros where everything new seems to be either Debian or RHEL based.
- nurg91 9y agoAs I'm satisfied with the distros I normally use, Lite and mint, I didn't check anything else for a few years. So, I'll try this out. Thanks!
- teekert 9y agoTo address your last concern, I use Solus on my Laptop, it's also a fully independent distro. It comes in 3 flavours targeting the desktop. It feels really well build. The community and maintainers are very responsive.
- eloy 9y agoWhy did you choose Linux over OpenBSD? I'd choose pf over iptables, although nftables looks pretty neat.
- mmirate 9y agoI'm guessing they assumed that BSD would have a lesser chance of having drivers for the hardware in their router (or if their router is ARM-based: specifically supporting the router's exact+particular system board and configuration of hardware) compared to Linux. A priori, I would make the same assumption; when I hear "router", I think "oh, that'll need OpenWrt".
- djsumdog 9y agoI was going to use either FreeBSD or OpenBSD, but no 802.11ac support in either. Actually I should have just went with it anyway. I could only get my car working in n mode and someone else who e-mailed me after finding that post said that particular Intel card doesn't work in AP mode in 802.11ac on Linux; had to buy a different card entirely.
- softblush 9y ago<edit> fooled
- vertex-four 9y agoApril 01 is April Fools' Day.
- softblush 9y agoHaha they got me there. Maybe I should wake up properly before reading HN
- rurban 9y agoI use it sucessfully to test musl with my apps.
- noncoml 9y agoNo systemd and dwm as the default window manager? I’m sold!
- aerique 9y agoI've been running it at work as my main dev OS for a couple of months now (before I ran Debian) and I've run into far less issues than I expected. It's really well done. Before Void Linux I contemplated jumping ship to FreeBSD or OpenBSD but Void Linux combines the best of BSD and Linux for me. (Except the awesome documentation and man pages found in the BSDs and it still uses a piece of Lennartware by default (but it can be removed): PulseAudio.) Oh, a disadvantage (at least when I installed it) was I had to go through a wiki page to get an encrypted setup. It's not in the default installer. (Wasn't too hard though.) edit: this last paragraph might not be true, see replies
- opk 9y agoIs pulseaudio really there by default? I've been using void for a couple of years. Made the choice early on to have sndio but no pulseaudio but I don't remember ever having to particularly remove pulseaudio.
- aerique 9y agoNow that you mention it, perhaps it was installed because I grabbed a Void Linux image with MATE? I'd have to do a reinstall to check, but I've got work to do ;-) I'll update my original post if I can though. Still, good to know it probably does not come with PA by default.
- a-nikolaev 9y agoMe too, I started with Void with MATE, which brought Pulseaudio among other things. I later removed Pulseaudio, and using only ALSA.
- a-nikolaev 9y agoI installed Void Linux on my new laptop this May, switching from Arch, which I'd been using for about six years. The experience is very positive overall. For desktop, I'm using AwesomeWM and NetworkManager, altho Void comes with a variety of options to choose from. I were afraid that their Wiki is not detailed enough, and expected that some packages could be missing. However, I could easily install everything I needed from the repository (except flashplugin). TeX is installed slightly differently, but the wiki entry helps here. Regarding documentation, DuckDuckGo does not show search results from Void Wiki, so I have to use Google search instead. Documentation seems sufficient, and where I need more, I can refer to Arch wiki. With Arch, all services seemed automatically enabled when the packages were installed, otherwise you had to use systemd commands for configuration, which seemed a bit opaque to me. In Void, which is using Runit, enabling a service (like alsa, crond, cupsd, etc) is a matter of creating a symlink, which feels very transparent and reliable. I think, I like the idea of keeping the information about your services in the plain view in the filesystem. I have never been a configuration guru, so prefer this transparency and simplicity, and it felt robust so far.
- rocqua 9y agoI'm using arch right now, and I can't think of any packages that automatically enable their own service. I could argue for the usability and transparency of systemd, but I won't. Simply because I think it is really important that alternatives to systemd exist. I personally like systemd as a init system and service manager, but think it is bundling too much. Variety is not just the spice of life, its needed for a health ecosystem. As for void linux, does it have anything close to the AUR in terms of package availability?
- a-nikolaev 9y agoYeah, I might be wrong when saying that services are automatically enabled in Arch. My understanding is that Void has xbps-src [1], [2] for installing packages from source code, and it is somewhat similar to AUR. Xbps-src package database is essencially a github repository, you clone it and use it to build and install packages for your system. I installed it and used only once to build some obscure video streaming program, which failed to compile, and I did not follow up to figure out why it failed. [1] https://github.com/voidlinux/void-packages/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/voidlinux/void-packages/blob/master/READM... [2] https://wiki.voidlinux.eu/Xbps-src https://wiki.voidlinux.eu/Xbps-src
- snarfy 9y agoWhat problems do .deb and .rpm have that .xbps solves?
- pweissbrod 9y ago"We were the first distribution to switch to LibreSSL by default, replacing OpenSSL." I'm not seeing the wisdom in this. OpenSSL has problems so instead of fixing them incremenally we are going to leverage a complete replacement thus risk many histories repeating itself plus a bevy of new undiscovered issues that come with less mature/less utilized projects. I'm not sold on that.
- burke 9y agoLibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that declared it was worthwhile to remove a bunch of legacy code to incrementally fix OpenSSL. It's not a rewrite.
- daptaq 9y agoHere's a great inteoduction, for anyone new or interested in using Void: http://troubleshooters.com/linux/void/whyvoid.htm http://troubleshooters.com/linux/void/whyvoid.htm I personally use it on my raspberry pi, which operates as my server/home page (http://phi.k.vu/ http://phi.k.vu/) and it's been fantastic for me. Far lower memory usage and much easier to configure. Xbps is fast and efficient, runit keeps it simple. It's like rediscovering linux or arch all over again, if that analogy means anything to anyone. Really deserves to be better known. The one thing that keeps me back from using it on my laptop (where I run Debian) is that texlive has to be installed as one whole package, and the incomplete wiki is the other (although arch wiki can cover up quite well for tt's blindspots)
- r0brodz 9y agoWell I just switched from ArtixLinux (arch-openrc) to Void. I simply reformatted my partitions execpt /home and viola. Its very nice. Nicer than Artix. Clean, the BSD-style bleeds thru. I know because I have installed a _lot_ of distros on this machine. A few screenshots. http://imgur.com/a/2IE94 http://imgur.com/a/2IE94 Thank you very much VoidLinux devs and volunteers! Awesome work!!