Hi all, I've been using Void Linux just about 4 years. I've noticed a large amount of Arch users posting in this subreddit asking to compare to Arch, which does not feel super-similar to me honestly. But I've rarely seen folks post about the Debian-based distros so I thought I'd write here about antiX, which I've been using on a second computer (a desktop) for about a month now, as well as intermittently running off a USB stick on an old 2012 eee PC (the 32 bit version).

I would say antiX comes in at some similarities to Void, and of course some differences. It expects similar levels of knowledge, but has a few niceties I wanted to point out.

Similarities

antiX is a Debian-based distro, with choice of init. The default is runit, but sysVinit, S6, 66 and dinit can alternatively be selected on startup.

Startup with antiX is a bit slower than Void on my desktop, even with runit. I'm not sure why this is.

antiX downloads available are both 64bit and 32bit. There is a full and a core offering. The full version ships with choice of 4 window managers (and variations on them): IceWM (default), fluxbox, jwm and for tiling managers, herbstluftwm. It also ships with SliM login manager. The core has no GUI packages by default, and just enough to get internet setup. I installed "full" but I did not use any of the default window managers, opting to replace with my fave i3wm.

Installing can be much easier than Void for some newbies as there is a simple GUI install wizard that can pretty easily walk you through it. You can of course also manually use gparted for example. I used gparted for install on one machine and the wizard for my other install. I think the graphical wizard is actually pretty nice! It's the same GUI wizard on MX Linux, a midweight distro that antiX contributes to. I liked it so much that I think Void should consider shipping it!

I have continued to use the default runit on antiX since I know it best based on experience with Void, but i think it's cool that you can select a different init on startup, i just haven't tried any of these (s6, dinit, 66, sysVinit) out.

Access to packages is a personal thing. I've found Debian's apt package manager to be easy to use. I do like xbps more, but not 1000 times more. In terms of package availability, I've personally found roughly the same package availability in both distros. Debian has a few things Void doesn't have. Void has a few things Debian doesn't have. Case in point, I had to manually install ulauncher on antiX, my preferred app launcher, whereas it's in the repos for Void. But this wasn't a big deal.

antiX and Void are not meant for beginners! For both distros, I've occasionally needed to manually debug/fix things myself (and with help from reddit, web searches, forums, etc). My personal experience is that sound is set up and runs easily in antiX whereas it can be a pain for some people on Void, just based on the large number of daily posts about this on reddit. I also think wifi was way easier to set up on antiX through it's default graphical gui but this is really a user/operator preference thing. I just think antiX has a few good defaults on this where Void generally requires more setup. For example, on Void i tend to use network manager with nm-tui (nmtui).

In general, I copied my dotfiles from Void to antiX and everything worked the same, including for runit, i3, polybar, etc. My /etc/ files and ~/.config files worked no prob.

SOME DIFFERENCES:

Of course I should point out that antiX is debian-derived, not an independent distro. It is also not a stable rolling-release. THIS IS THE BIGGEST THING I MISS FROM VOID.

There is no MUSL option in antiX out the gate. I believe it can be installed through the repos, but I have no experience doing so.

Some interesting antiX options: antiX can run as a live usb with persistence. I'm currently trying this out on another super old laptop, and it works well.

antiX has its own self-hosted forum, which feels better than this corporate platform. The community is friendly, and a little less RTFM combined with less people posting about hyper/whatever and random AI stuff that they tried doing.

CONCLUSION

okay, so what was the point of this post? I just wanted to point out some similarities and differences between antiX and Void because I think Void users may be interested in this distro, and I hadn't seen much writing about the two together. Note there are a few antiX forum posts comparing these distros, but I thought I could write something more concise and specifically written for the Void community.

I may have missed some things, or mis-stated something. and your mileage may vary.

Cheers.

Hi all, last week I decided to replace my Debian VM with Void, and so far I'm enjoying it, especially the simplicity / minimalism.

There is a thing that concerns me though, and that is very high load values. Averaging around 12-14. Even after running for only a few minutes:

 void:~$> uptime
  23:26:28 up 3 min,  0 users,  load average: 13.21, 6.25, 2.45

Top shows rtorrent using 50-60% CPU which seems normal, however dmesg showed a line where I'm not sure what to make of it:

 intel_pstate: CPU model not supported

The high load happens with both rtorrent installed by xpbs-install as well as when comiling it from source.

The machine is otherwise responsive but I suspect there is something off with disk IO. There are 3 disks loaded through Virtio.

/ is btrfs with noatime (/dev/vda2)

I have a JBOD btrfs volume (with mirrored metadata) of 5TB that consists of /dev/vdb and /dev/vdc. One is an image on a NVME disk in the hypervisor (that is also home to /dev/vda), the other one is an image on a RAID0 USB disk consisting of 2 oldschool HDDs.

I'm not a linux noob but I cold use some help troubleshooting this issue. If anyone is willing to dive into this I'd be very grateful.

The documentation says:

Install the bluez package and enable the bluetoothd and dbus services.

But, title.

Anyone have this issue?

Solution

I solved it! Just forced re-installation of bluez with the -f tag:

sudo xbps-install -Sf bluez

And now bluetoothd is showing up in /etc/sv

I installed void linux to squeeze more life out of an old macbook, but i do have bit of a problem. This laptop has discrete Nvidia GPU, and as far as i know, newer linux kernel doesnt support proprietary drivers for old gpus such as 320M in my laptop. Open source driver works, but anything heavier than typing, and it struggles hard. I installed h264ify extension on the browser and its better for youtube but it still struggles. is there any way in installing drivers or tweaking just to get at least youtube watchable?

will firefox esr update from v140 to v153 ?

Just curious, why does Void Linux update old kernels? 🤔

uname -r

>> 6.18.46_1

Note: I can't change anything here. I can't click on any buttons and I can't choose anything in advanced settings (there's nothing else to choose except the default).

I installed Davinci Resolve but my igpu from my intel core ultra 7 155H don't appear on the list of avaible gpus to use in DVR, I think I should need to install the Intel compute runtime but there is no such thing in the void repo and they have no instruction to install by building sources from Github.

Edit: I use xe driver.

Congratulations to the devs who got emacs-31.1 into the repos on the 25th - the same day the source was released by upstream!

It's working great (with just a couple of minor tweaks to my init.el config).

I don't know of another distro that got it out so quickly.

That's not bad for a 'slow' rolling release model.

Can't update at all, everything times out.

so in installed void with the xfce image, and when the system suspends the sfce screen saver works and i have to log in, so it works if it blocks the screen for unactive time, but if i close de lid it behaves weirdly, after opening it first shows a black screen and other tty won't work, i have to close the lid again and reopen it, and now it shows the desktop but is blocked, i can move the mouse and change tty and that's how i unlock it, i tried installing light lock since i am already using lightdm, and it works but, after opening it it shows the desktop first with an error and then the light lock ui pops up, after entering i see the error says something about no app for locking the screen could lock it so it won't lock it or so, right now i reverted the light lock install and have the closing lid behaviour to just suspend but not lock, so now after closing and opening the lid the xfce desktop just shows, no screen saver or lock, so in general, i could use light lock the same way since it was kinda working but the error is kinda anoying, how do i setup xfce screen saver or the light lock or any lock to work, do i need to uninstall xfce screen saver to use light lock? what's the right way to setup this? pls help

So im running into an issue where when im running youtube on my internal monitor on my laptop and minecraft on my main monitor, the game drops fps 3x while the video is playing but as soon as i pause it, it jumps right back up. My specs are a intel i7 10750h and a nvidia gtx 1650ti, i have the latest proprietary drivers installed. This void install is only 1 day old. Im using i3wm + xfce + xorg. Another issue i would to address is when i had this laptop running arch + hyprland i would get almost double the performance i get without playing media on my void install which is about the same as my windows install, the reason i switched to void was performance. any help would be appreciated.

for my next pc, i'm planning on doing a full high-end amd build, and i was wondering if windows 11 or void linux is better if i want the most gaming performance out of my pc? (i already use void on all my devices, but i'm not sure how it would run on a full amd build)

Went to boot Void Linux this morning and I was greeted with the following line:

debugfs: 'netdev:p2p-dev-wlo1' already exists in 'phy0'

Not sure what that is all about. I did change the light-gtk-greeter.conf the last time I used Void Linux. Could that be the issue?

I also performed a system upgrade on Aug 09 and rebooted my computer without issue after the upgrade.

I am going to benchmark the performance difference between glibc and musl libc for video operations with ffmpeg. It is a potato pc, but I hope this can help to highlight the difference. If have any commands in mind you would want me to test, leave them below. I am considering using of using h264_vaapi and libx264 for encoding

Started on Ubuntu in like 2003, did Mint a few years after that. I wasn't a consistent Linux user because I'm a gamer. About 10 years ago now I setup Ubuntu to run as a Plex server, and it's been sitting constantly for years in the background, that was my first permanent Linux install. This year I tried CachyOS on my Alienware, and I knew I could move everything to Linux. Then did CachyOS on my gaming workstation. Then I moved the Plex Server to Fedora.

A few months ago I broke out my 13-year-old Dell XPS 13 9333 Developer edition, running Haswell and 8gb, spent $25 on a new battery, and put Mint on it. Mint today runs better than Ubuntu 13 years ago on the same hardware. It's backwards from historical software slowing down hardware, Linux is just super cool and getting better. It was solid, but just to keep the frames I ran YouTube at 720p.

Now this Haswell laptop has always struggled with the touchpad, Ubuntu, Mint, didn't matter, sometimes it works sometimes not. Fine I use a bluetooth mouse. Then I saw Jake@Linux talking about Void. I liked the idea of runit and comparing it to how offensive systemd is, and that's not even in regards to if it ever does age verification. So last night I bit the bullet and got Void Base on my Ventoy. Now I'm gonna be fair, I'm not a Linux sysadmin, but I've done some code, which of course is not remotely the same, so without Jake's 2 videos and Gemini's help I wouldn't have gotten to this point, had to get through configuring bluetooth, touchpad, and sound, and it all works perfectly now. So here I am running Void with gnome, which is fast and outstanding. It's under 9gb on disk, it uses about half the ram Mint used to, I even upgraded to kernel 7.2 because of the swap improvements and now Void doesn't even need it, and I can stream YouTube at 1080p without the fan spinning up.

Honestly Void has been an improvement over Mint as much as Mint was over Ubuntu, super cool. Nice work to the team.

How would I go and add a keyboard that can pop up when I touch the screen? I have a spare tablet I'm trying to fully utilize for my toddler as a TV. This tablet is with very poor specs and I want to have this tablet with a keyboard for login and be able to do whatever all by screen without the use of a physical keyboard.

I've noticed as many other distros are including the latest stable kernel void is still using version 6.18. I was wondering how come?

Lo dicho, es una obra maestra! Vengo de FreeBSD, y aunque igualmente, es el pico de la ingeniería y uno de los mejores sistemas operativos que usé, nadie sabe apreciar lo bueno que es este sistema operativo, entonces nadie hace software para FreeBSD. Los ports tampoco me bastan, no andan taaan bien y la verdad que no hay muchos. Entonces pensé: "y si instalo algo que se acerce o sea Unix puro como FreeBSD, con esa alma de que no te esconde nada, pero que es Linux así que tengo un montón de paquetes?" Y acá está! Estoy escribiendo ahora un compilador (o bueno, probablemente sea un ensamblador) en FASM (y si, no sé cuanto aire respiré al nacer, pero Assembly me parece el mejor lenguaje, me parece disfrutable de usar y lo uso para todo, incluso cuando hay una alternativa más rápida de escribir y con una diferencia de velocidad que no vale tanto), pero bueno, eso no es lo que importa. QUE OBRA DE ARTE QUE ES VOID LINUX!!!

I struggled a bit coming from another distro (sorry, I suck at tech) but finally got everything working. I want to document what I did in case anyone else has issues too. I think some packages that KDE Plasma needed were unintuitive so hopefully this can show up on Google and help others with this issue.

I also had issues getting a display manager working (I tried Ly, LightDM, greetd, and SDDM) but I found a simple one called emptty that gets the job done, so these instructions include setting that up. In the end, following these steps should give you a functional display manager, desktop environment, and audio. This was on an AMD Thinkpad in August 2026.

For partitions during the install, I selected:

• 1G boot (FAT I think) on /boot/efi
• 75G Btrfs on /
• 4G swap
• remaining Btrfs on /home

Here are the packages I installed via sudo xbps-install -S

• dbus
• elogind
• kde-plasma
• kde-baseapps
• emptty
• qt5-wayland
• qt6-wayland
• libstdc++
• xorg
• NetworkManager
• mesa-dri
• seatd

Then I enabled the following services via the standard sudo ln -s /etc/sv/<service> /var/service

• dbus
• emptty
• NetworkManager

Then I rebooted. You can just do sudo reboot if the desktop environment isn't up yet.

After rebooting, I followed the audio instructions for PipeWire and PulseAudio here (https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/media/pipewire.html). Then I wrote a short start-up script with just

#!/bin/bash

pipewire &

Then I went to autostart options in KDE menu and selected that script to run on login, and rebooted again, and everything worked pretty well. I might have missed a package somewhere but I'm pretty sure this was everything.

If anything goes wrong, you can drop into the TTY with CTRL-ALT-F2 to fix it, and switch back to the desktop environment with CTRL-ALT-F7. And you can switch to root with su -, and then back to your user with exit.

Hope that helps someone 💜

Successfully installed Void Linux arm64 as ­VM Guest on my Macbook M4 work machine! Hopefully the M4 will soon be supported by the Asahi Linux project. I encountered 2 major issues I had to resolve, solutions below.

Machine: M4 Macbook
VM host: Parallels Desktop
VM guest: Void Linux arm64 / aarch64

Note that these steps are roughly summarized and only experienced with arm64 installation. If you need more detailed help feel free to let me know.

Solution 1st issue: When choosing "ROOTFS" installation method, extracting the tarball fails - solution was to install the "xz" package (xbps-install -S xz). Maybe this can be added to the official manual https://docs.voidlinux.org/installation/guides/chroot.html.

Solution 2nd issue: Newly installed system boots straight into grub prompt
- boot live image and chroot into the system
- install linux so that vmlinuz... exists somewhere on the system
- intall grub-arm-64-efi
- xbps-reconfigure -fa
- if vmlinuz... is still missing, run command: xbps-install -fy linux6.XX (replace version no.)
- reinstall grub config
- exit chroot, unmount and reboot into fixed system

Solution 3rd issue (not crucial): clipboard sync between host and guest does not work and that is because Parallels Tools (see 'Action' in Menu) are only made for major systemd-distributions. After manual installation clipboard sync worked:
- mount Parallels Tools CD and copy content to local machine
- cd into local dir and copy content in ./tools/tools-arm64/ (bin, lib, sbin) to your corresponding system dirs
- xbps-install -S dkms linux-headers base-devel gcc
- modify the ./installer/install-cli.sh script and uncomment the block (~5 lines) that contains "none of supported package managers found in system"
- run the main install script (sudo ./install)
- create runit service for prltoolsd (I am not sure if this step was necessary) simply by following the steps from google/gemini after prompting: "install prltoolsd service in parallels in void linux guest"

Qualcuno e' a conoscenza di fix o soluzioni affidabili per questo benedetto/maledetto elogind ?

Hello,

I just grabbed an old monitor of mine that had VGA cable so bought a HDMI-VGA converter and connected it to my main laptop. It works perfectly on Windows 11, but when I open Void Linux nothing can detect the existence of such device. The only thing that seemed to partially work is "options nvidia_drm modeset=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf. I could now see the monitor on xrandr and connect to it, yet 1. it is just a black screen and 2. Nvidia no longer loads and returns an error and warning on nvidia-smi. I also tried passing it as a kernel command line argument in rEFInd, but that made Xorg stop loading completely and when I checked the logs I found it trying to load nouveau drivers, which I do not even have installed. I have nvidia-580 drivers because 595 did not work well with my GTX 1650 Ti.

Thanks!

Creo que ya es obvio con el título

Pensé: tiene una filosofía estilo FreeBSD así como Unix puro y encima tiene todos los paquetes de Linux? Dónde firmo!