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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

(I'm replying to you twice b/c totally different topics)

Tell me more about your Void experience. I've been meaning to give it a shot, except I don't get as much enjoyment out of fussing with distros as I used to. What are the pain points? Under Artix, I used dinit which I really liked, but I tried s6 first and absolutely hated it. I didn't try runit; how is it?

What I'm most interested in is xbps, because IMO it's the package manager that makes or breaks a system. I'm quite fond of pacman and have encountered far fewer dependency hell situations than I did with either rpm or deb, and rolling release is a must. xbps looks kind of like a rolling stable release?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Void is rolling release IIRC. The package manager is quite fast and gets the job done. The pain point is that Void has a lower selection of package in its repos compared to say, Arch. Some good stuff is there (for example I was looking for a third party Spotify client ncspot? Back in the day and it was packaged in Void's repos) but if someone uses niche stuff a lot, there can be issues.

    Of course there is Flatpak support. And the system itself is comparatively lean and fast. I don't think my installation of Void came with plenty of pre-installed apps.

    It ships in two builds : glibc or musl. The latter one is less favored because it only makes life tougher honestly. Runit support is a strong point of it though personally I don't have any anti systemd qualms.

    The documentation is basic and okayish. I still often go to Arch Wiki since that's honestly the most detailed. Also, I just found that it's the highest rated distro on Distro Watch. I have distro hopped a long time and Void is decent. I still hold Debian in higher regard since it's slightly easier for a novice to get used to (though it's repos can be hold often old versions of software) and also because it was my main entry point to the Linux world.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Void is rolling release IIRC

    That's what I thought, but the main website says Void focuses on stability over being cutting edge, which would imply some sort of release cycle. Or, maybe they just update packages less frequently.

    I still hold Debian in higher regard since it's slightly easier for a novice to get used to

    It's hard to beat Mint as a novice distro, for sure.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I mean I guess there are more noob friendly distros than Debian [ there was a time when all I saw was Ubuntu around me and it's ubiquitous Unity DE was instantly recognizable to my eye] but chances are many of them are ultimately based on Debian itself. Mint's main ISO is based on Ubuntu [and indirectly Debian] whilst they also release a LMDE [Linux Mint Debian Edition] as a fallback variant directly based on Debian. I guess Zorin OS or elementary OS are also decent but they also seem more like heavy reskins to me than anything else.[Zorin has a Windows like feel to it].

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Mint eschews all of the Snap crap, though, doesn't it?

    Jesus, please tell me it does. I've been recommending it to beginners. I thought it was sanitized.

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