Comment by nine_k
14 hours ago
It's looks absurdly simple, but works very well. (Speaking as a long-term Void Linux user.)
Configuring a new service is also trivially simple.
Dependencies sort of can be handled: you can start (or stop) another service from within your service; runit will retry if your service fails to start due to a dependency not yet running.
I'm a huge fan of Void as well. Surprised it didn't get a mention in the article. I didn't even realize that runit had an existence outside of Void.
I've had various issues installing Void so I succumbed to Manjaro, which works surprisingly well. I have noticed in general that many non-systemd distributions work less well over time for some reason. Slackware is the best example - one release per decade means it is factually dead, but even trying more modern variants simply no longer works as it once used to work. At the same time there is less and less adapted documentation to be found. It seems the non-systemd distributions not only declined in absolute numbers but also in regards to manpower and time investment. MX Linux also lags behind updating versions of numers programs: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx - it has gotten a bit better after libretto, but it still lags behind compared to e. g. Fedora.
The thing where Void really stands out in my opinion is "hackability" and providing an inviting on-ramp for making certain kinds of customizations that would be intimidating in terms of their complexity in other distros. -- I don't use it as a daily-driver desktop.
For example, I have a chroot'able tarball providing all dependencies for all software I write that runs on a server. I build that tarball myself from source in an airgapped environment. (I had been doing something like this, minus the airgapping, with Gentoo from about 2012 until 2024). I looked for a replacement for Gentoo in 2024 and landed on Void. Most of the time when I do a build, I just pull the latest commit from the repo, and it "just works", even though Void is not even advertising itself as a source-based distro. Sometimes it breaks because of the distro itself (just like Gentoo used to). But, with Void it has always been so much easier to diagnose and fix issues, and the project is also quite inviting to merging such fixes. With Gentoo, it had always been quite painful to deal with the layers of complexity pertaining to Gentoo itself, rather than any package that has decided to break. Void, on the other hand, has managed to avoid such extra complexity.
Lately, I've started to play around with Void's tool for creating the live installer ISO. It's quite malleable and can easily be repurposed for building minimalist live/stateless environments for pretty much any purpose. I'm using that to create VM guests to isolate some contexts for security-purposes like a "poor man's Qubes OS" kind of thing.
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Artix is great IMO. You can choose your init system. It's not for your grandmother perhaps. It's a rolling distro like Manjaro and I think it generally benefits from the Arch ecosystem. I only really notice it getting better since I've been using it for the last 3-4 years. The change to using pipewire for sound was unpleasant and the one other major problem I had was Chromium breaking Signal for a time. Everything else has been happiness.
Non-useful distros become unmaintained, that's how things are, regardless of service supervision. If you want a maintained non-systemd distro, try Alpine Linux.
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> Slackware is the best example - one release per decade means it is factually dead
As a daily user of slack I find your statement quite interesting.
If you run "-current", all your programs are up to date, and you get new releases much sooner than any debian variant.
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> Slackware is the best example - one release per decade means it is factually dead,
In slackware's case it just means most users have switched to the rolling release model of the -current branch really.
Gitlab also uses runit for service supervision.