Comment by onli
13 hours ago
The article mentions that the author had a negative experience with Void Linux, that it was missing programs in its repository. If you considered it, give it a try anyway. Void is fast and ridiculously stable, even more so given it's a rolling release distro (so often has very new program versions). And in contrast to the author, I was impressed with the broad range of the package system - he might have had a bit of bad luck with the selection.
I've found a very comfortable home on Void Linux for nearly a decade at this point, and wouldn't consider any other distro for desktop use. I find Void to be rock-solid stable and relentlessly simple.
The author of TFA hopped from Mint -> Debian -> Bazzite -> Fedora -> Void -> Artix, so Void is an extremely obvious outlier here.
Aside from Void, every other distro he tried was either a newbie-friendly desktop distro (Mint, Debian, Fedora, Bazzite), or "Arch, but easier, with an installer" (Artix).
Bad luck with Void's package selection is fair enough, but I'm not sure what he meant by "driver compatibility was a big issue" - Void uses an upstream kernel and driver availability should be roughly the same anywhere.
He's using a Ryzen APU on desktop so graphics drivers shouldn't have been an issue there. The MacBook had problems with Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers on Artix(!), but I'd wager this would affect all distros out of the box, and Void has the Broadcom drivers[0] available as well.
It's frustrating that he doesn't explicitly mention what he couldn't find drivers for on Void. I assume it was Broadcom Wi-Fi and he didn't enable the nonfree repository. In fairness, Void's docs don't cover any Broadcom quirks so maybe this isn't as discoverable as it should be.
[0] https://voidlinux.org/packages/?arch=x86_64&q=broadcom
Seconding this. I was impressed by Void linux stability and speed: xbps (with xtools) might be the fastest and most powerful package manager I've *ever* used.
Sure, Void doesn't have the endless options of Arch+AUR for packages, but it had everything I needed. Even the well-maintained, latest versions of less common software, like Nim compiler.
The author might also missed that Void has a non-free repository, that you have to install for stuff like proprietary drivers, DRM and Steam.