Void

Reader supplied reviews for Void Average rating 9.1 from 297 review(s) What are your thoughts on Void? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- current202502022024031420230628202210012021093020191109201811112017100720150221 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: current Rating: 10 Date: 2026-09-21 Country: United States Votes: 17 Best Linux distro. Stopped my hopping. Lightweight and technically elegant. XBPS is the fastest package manager that won't break your system. Recursive closures map dependencies with absolute precision. It's a much simpler approach than complicated SAT solvers like dnf. This simplicity makes updating very fast. It's faster than pacman, and users won't have pre-update anxiety like Arch. Unless you absolutely need the AUR, Void is the superior choice. A rolling release done right. Uses runit instead of the increasingly bloated systemd for its init system, which is faster and lighter. It's amazing how their devs realized that a simple init system is all you need to run linux. After years of using Ubuntu/Debian, I wanted to try a rolling release distro, so I installed Arch. I ran into issues immediately and it wasn't an easy install. When an update broke my system I ran out of patience. That's when I found Void and couldn't be happier. You can choose glibc or musl for software compatibility. Glibc is the older, more mature C library, but it's become increasingly bloated. Musl is newer, smaller and lighter. Unless you're gaming locally with steam, musl is all you need. Most everything works with it. I've run musl for months without issue. I predict that the Steam devs will move away from Arch and recommend Void with glibc for linux installs when they discover how great it is. Other than configuring pipewire, which gave me a little trouble during install, I can't think of any cons. But I didn't follow the pipewire instructions on the Void website. You need to manually set up services like dbus, NetworkManager, and your display manager, but once you understand why the concept becomes clear. You can install any desktop environment on it including tiling managers. Void's been described as having the best simplicity to reliability ratio. I would agree with that statement. Fewer moving parts means there is less that can go wrong. If you appreciate simplicity, minimalism, reliability and performance, Void may be the distro you've been waiting for. Give it a try. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: current Rating: 9 Date: 2026-09-18 Country: United States Votes: 17 Void is the distro I keep coming back to after 27 years of using Linux on the desktop. I started with Corel Linux, then Red Hat, then Slackware, and stuck with Slack until around 2014 when I started seeing cracks forming in the management side of things. Pat and Eric and all the others involved are great people but as the oldest surviving distro it was bound to start showing its age. With that said, I didn't want to go to a systemd based distro as, at that time, I felt it was too unstable for a serious daily use machine, and Debian and all of the other major distros had begun adopting it without a care for its stability nor its developers' cavalier attitude of "move fast, break things, fsck the users, wontfix". I don't remember where I first heard about Void but I was immediately drawn to it as I had been evaluating Arch Linux for a couple of years, and Void seemed to have all of the benefits of Arch with none of the drawbacks. I tried it on a secondary computer for a few weeks and was blown away by how clean, minimal, and immediately usable it was on a fresh installation. Like Slackware, there is minimal patching done to the packages that make up the distro, basically only strictly necessary changes. This allows the various parts to shine in the way their own developers intended. Xfce is an excellent example; distros like Xubuntu and Fedora love to aggressively theme and tweak and modify that DE to the point that it's clumsy and slow; when evaluating those distros I found myself undoing almost everything they changed and I still couldn't get back to vanilla Xfce. With Void you get it exactly as it comes from upstream; a blank slate to mold into one's own image. Maybe that's not for everyone, but for someone like me who has been on Linux since the days of manually configuring X11 and writing my own fstab entries, it works well. There are downsides to Void, and this was especially true during the transition period when its founder all but disappeared along with the keys to the original website several years back. It's a tiny core team, and while it's now in a healthy state and that kind of thing isn't likely to happen again, it's still a huge project with only a few maintainers, and there have been hiccups and outages over the years. Void isn't the only distro to suffer from a situation like that, but the difference is they recovered and have done nothing but improve since the dark days. One other criticism of Void is that it only allows the main Firefox and Firefox-ESR browsers in the repos, they don't allow arguably superior forks such as Librewolf and Waterfox. This used to be the case for Chromium based browsers as well, but they now have Vivaldi and Opera in the repos. Why this changed for Chromium browsers but not Firefox I have no idea but it's a bit annoying, considering their stance was that it was too much work to maintain *any* browser forks in the first place. With that said, it's possible to roll one's own build for the missing browsers via xbps-src, and at least one developer has done so for Librewolf, maintaining their own repo which can be added to xbps and kept up to date with the rest of the system. Regardless of all of that, Void remains beautifully simple yet powerful, easy to maintain and a perfect example of a Linux distro being almost completely vanilla and ready to mold into whatever you need it to be. Standout features: - xbps and xbps-src - runit - excellent performance even on older hardware - an experienced and driven team maintaining it - simple text based installer that works great headless as well as in a windowed terminal - nothing "extra", the base is just enough to get you booted and where you go from there is up to you All in all, the best distro for someone trying to go minimal without going all the way to LFS or Crux, while keeping most of the benefits of those methods. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: current Rating: 2 Date: 2026-08-28 Country: Japan Votes: 2 Void Linux was once my favorite distribution. I used it for more than five years and genuinely loved its simplicity, stability, and rolling-release model. Sadly, those qualities have been overshadowed by what now feels like a serious lack of maintenance, leadership, and communication. The official documentation and news are especially concerning. The Full Disk Encryption guide has remained outdated for years. It still describes GRUB’s limited LUKS2 support, recommends LUKS1, and does not reflect modern Argon2id support. When changes to components such as dracut break existing configurations and cause issues like a second password prompt during boot, the official website provides no timely explanation, update, or acknowledgement. Users are left to investigate and reverse-engineer solutions on their own. Void also appears to be falling behind in package and feature maintenance. Some packages, such as ZuluCrypt, remain available despite showing little or no visible maintenance for years. This does not necessarily mean that every such package is unusable—Cryptsetup, for example, can be used instead—but it does raise serious questions about the reliability and maintenance status of the repository as a whole. Likewise, upstream GRUB has gained Argon2id support, while Void still appears to be relying on GRUB 2.12. It would not be surprising if that situation continued for years. Void’s official forum on Reddit often provides workarounds, but users may still be left without clear, authoritative solutions to important problems. Community advice cannot fully compensate for outdated official documentation and the lack of communication from the project. I understand that Void is developed in the spare time of a small number of people and that it is primarily a volunteer project. However, good intentions and a long history cannot substitute for active maintenance, current documentation, modern security features, and accountability. The current Void feels neglected, unstable, and increasingly untrustworthy. After more than five years of using Void Linux, it is painful to say this, but I have permanently moved away from it. Void was once my favorite distribution, but I will not be returning, and I can no longer recommend it as a dependable operating system. Was this review helpful? 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