Just now, on a whim, I ran stat -c '%w' /var/log/wtmp and I just realized I’ve been using Void Linux for 2 years.
I wanna talk about my experience using Void Linux in this post.
Two years back, I’d decided to move to another distro because I was bored with Debian on my ASUS laptop and at the same time I bought a Thinkpad and wondering which distro should I put on this newly bought machine. I’d been looking for a lightweight distro with a good package manager. I saw a video about package manager comparison and seeing xbps which I thought was weird because of its name. Also this video about init system comparison at boot time – though a Void core team member pointed out that runit isn’t actually faster than systemd, since its early boot process is fully sequential and slow tasks block the whole boot; if systemd feels slow, it’s usually a misconfiguration rather than the init system itself.
Getting used to it
At first, installing Void was challenging because that was the first time I installed a distro within a TUI, since I was always used to the Calamares installer. It took me like hours to install Void because I was too scared I’d choose the wrong option and make Void unable to boot. Long story short, I succeeded in installing Void and I’m really proud of it and showed it to my colleagues in uni because I’m the only person using this unknown distro while everyone used more mainstream distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora and Arch.
Within weeks, I got myself used to runit and xbps. The only pain using Void was about how few packages distributed within the official upstream repo. This made me fall behind at uni because I was unable to install software A while everyone could easily install that software on their machine whether using their package manager or official .deb or .rpm file.
But that made me understand about installing software that isn’t on the official Void repository. For example: installing Metasploit Framework and other niche security software that Void doesn’t have. I managed to build and install them myself. Now I maintain some packages for Void.
Contributing to Void
Contributing to open source is the most enjoyable hobby for me because I want to do something impactful for the community I’m involved in. Contributing to Void is one of the easiest ways to contribute to open source because the source packages are hosted on GitHub, similar to Nix packages. It’s open to anyone who’s willing to open issues or PRs.
Void is a great distro but it seems like it lacks contributors, especially package maintainers. There are many outdated and orphaned packages on Void, so I tried to contribute package updates back in 2025. I started with updating the version of zk, a CLI tool for managing your Zettels (see: changes on my PKM workflow). At first, I thought maintaining packages would be hard in terms of technicality, but in reality it’s so easy; the most important thing is that you have to read the manuals on the void-packages repository. The hardest part about maintaining packages is time. I have to spare my time maintaining it while also attending uni and doing my part-time work. But I managed to get through it.
The most impressive thing I did while making PRs to Void was updating the whole Cinnamon DE stack because of its massive dependency chain, and the core member merged my PR, yay! I’m also packaging SimpleX Chat because I personally use it. SimpleX Chat is hard to package because the repository is complex and has dependencies on Haskell and Java, so it remains an open PR. Dear Void core member, please review my SimpleX Chat PR.
Learned more
Since using Void Linux, it also makes me really understand Linux on the lower level though I can’t call myself a pro. I doubt I’d understand this if I’d stayed on Debian or Mint (Mint is my first ever distro btw).
Void’s init system runit is also transparent, they’re just plain shell scripts which I can read the flow. I didn’t know how the init system worked before while I was still on Debian-based distro because Systemd is so well prepared and user-friendly IMO.
Talking about the community, Void core members seem really pragmatic and helpful from what I’ve experienced while troubleshooting and contributing PRs. Though, there are some members that have less friendly tone while communicating but I’m cool with that.
Conclusion
My experience so far on Void Linux after 2 years using it has been decent and I’m planning to stay longer in this small distro. So I guess I’ll check back in another two years.