[altrus]

Slackware was my first linux distribution, and one that I used continuously before moving to Arch.

As it happens, I think Arch embodies many of the original Slackware principles, but its focus on more modern hardware led to it growing a larger community - one that includes great documentation.

[kdtsh]

The Arch Wiki is a treasure, I used it when setting up Slackware on a MacBook Pro because it had the most comprehensive description of the caveats and gotchas for the laptop of anywhere on the WWW.

[bitwize]

Arch embodied many of the original Slackware principles, once.

These days I don't know what they're doing, but Void is basically Arch without the bullshit (and with runit instead of systemd, thank goodness).

[d_tr]

What bullshit are you referring to? Void sure seems like an interesting alternative, but I am happy with Arch atm so I have not tried it yet.

[bitwize]

If you are happy with Arch, keep using Arch. My persnickety criteria shouldn't affect others' distro choice. But Arch's maintainers left simplicity on the table a long time ago, with a few annoying symptoms, notably:

1) Arch changes shit in massive ways resulting in huge flag days. Once every few years may be tolerable, but they tended to happen alarmingly often, requiring me to check the wiki and manually recombobulate the system. Arch's policy is pretty much update every day, and unless you hit a very narrow window to update, or even if you do, check the wiki every day and be prepared to manually recombobulate per our instructions. I'm old and cranky and my daily driver distro shouldn't need that much care. Void is designed how Arch used to be, which means I may not need to recombobulate at all, sometimes with a year or two between updates, and if I do it's much easier to do under Void.

2) Systemd. Frickin' systemd. Void is the first distro to switch from systemd to something else (runit).

[doubled112]

I hear good things about Void, but last time I tried to install it, the mirror I was pulling from had the download time estimate at a couple of days, and I didn't have time to muck about that day.

Might be time to try it again - or a different mirror

[wrycoder]

I was enthusiastic about Void, until I learned more about its history.

[rogers18445]

What history is that and why does it matter today?

[doubled112]

https://voidlinux.org/news/2018/05/serious-issues.html

Same problem as any other project with a single owner, or even a small team. It is at risk of disappearing one day, never to be heard from again.

There are a lot of important projects that fall into this category. It certainly isn't unique to Void.

[rogers18445]

That drama has ended, he was demoted from dictator. Now things are chugging along with multiple contributors like most other projects.

For me Void seems like a very good distro, I think of it as a naked kernel with runnit init and xbps as the package manager, nothing gets in the way. It also has the nice property where the git repo is the distro in every sense.

[wrycoder]

While the problem wasn’t unique, the hostile takeover of the project was. The honorable and legal course of action would be to fork.

The owner had built the distro single-handed over ten years, and GitHub and Freenode helped to eject him from his own project, over his eventual strenuous objections.

https://www.michaelwashere.net/post/2018-11-28-enobdfl/

Even that link doesn’t give a balanced story. You have to track down the founder’s posts to hear his side and to understand why he had stopped contributing for awhile.