1y ago

Unmasking the hidden gems of Void Linux | Animesh Sahu

animeshz.github.io

22 comments

Services are bash scripts?
Oh no. That's horrifying. I'll never go back to the bad old days where my system constantly has dozens of untestable buggy bash scripts running.
I currently have zero bash scripts running on my system until I open steam, and there's no world where I'd go back.
- /bin/sh is not /bin/bash
  
  POSIX shells are horrible unmaintainable bug factories.
  shellcheck is not enough to make them safe programming languages. They are acceptable only in an interactive context.
  Having anything encourage people to write POSIXy shell scripts is a design flaw.
This is quite interesting, especially that tool to check changes made to /etc. Might have to give Void a try now. But does anyone know what the update cadence is like? Is it bleeding-edge like Arch, where you get new kernels and Mesa etc not long after upstream updates?
Edit: Nevermind, looks like Void fails my freerdp test. Guess that seals the deal.
- Freerdp test? I'm curious.
  
  It's just a check on the version number. As per my previous link, Void's FreeRDP is still stuck on 2.x, whereas 3.x stable came out last December, with the latest stable being v3.4.0, released 3 weeks ago.
  Nix also fails this test btw, since they too are still stuck on 2.x - and this is an example I've been using often as an argument against Nix fanbois who tend to claim that Nixpkgs is equivalent or even superior to the AUR, when in reality that's not the case.
  The reason why I'm so interested in 3.x is because it's a major upgrade with a ton of QoL improvements. Any serious RDP user will want to switch to FreeRDP 3.x, especially if they're a Wayland user / game over RDP /use RemoteApps (eg WinApps) etc. So I check the FreeRDP version of a distro as an indicator whether that distro is worth my time or not, hence why I call it the "freerdp test". 3.x is also consider stable release btw, so there's really no excuse for a distro not to package it and at least make it available - perhaps with a new name so as to not force an upgrade, if they're concerned about compatibility issues.
- Edit: Nevermind, looks like Void fails my freerdp test. Guess that seals the deal.
  What is the failed test about ?
The author would likely really enjoy gentoo. Imo it has all those benefits and a little more, plus its more popular.
- They are similar but one is mainly a source based distro which can also install binary packages while void is the other way around. Each has its advantages and downsides.
  
  You already said it, but even if you want mostly binaries, gentoo is becoming a distribution that can do that. So I don't think this is something that sets them apart.
  Plus, gentoo handles compilations so well, it is almost as simple as binary package managers.
Quite the font choice
Oh, Internet - thank you for not disappointing me.

22 comments