-------------------------------------------------
Title: Falling back in love with Void Linux
Date: 2022-02-10
Device: Laptop
Mood: Content
-------------------------------------------------
A nice relaxing day today, bookended by a couple
of meetings which both went well. It's nice to
begin to catch up with people in my non-work
circles after about three months of only really
concentrating on my home life, and recovering from
COVID.
I'm beginning to fall deeply in love with Void
Linux again. I've been running it on my laptop for
a month or so now, having previously run Void on a
lot of smaller devices between about 2018-2020.
Before we moved house, I was running most of my
smarthome and network services 'stuff' on RPi
boards with Void almost exclusively, but I only
ever ran it briefly as a desktop.
I decided to install it on this work laptop in
preparation for my Framework laptop arriving
(hopefully some time this month). I wanted to
refresh some of my dotfiles and get to grips with
Sway/Wayland having previously only used i3/X11.
In truth, there's very little to get-to-grips
with; Void itself has a vanishingly small
footprint, and Sway is nearly a drop-in
replacement for i3.
Using Void feels comprehensible in a way I've not
found with other Linuxes. I learned most of what I
know about Linux a long long time ago, in the
late-nineties and early-aughts (mainly through the
fondly-remembered Linux From Scratch book; and
tying up the phone line downloading source
packages on a 56k modem). This was all *long*
before opaque things like systemd came along, not
to mention the other twenty years of evolution
which happened in the Linux world since then. So
systems like Void which are fundamentally just a
kernel and a few init scripts feel very familiar.
The only comparable system which I've used in
recent years is OpenBSD.
Void runs superbly on this laptop. Not only does
it take tiny sips of power (with the display at
about half brightness and a full battery, the
system reports 26hours of idle time -- granted
this changes under usage when the CPU clocks up
but I still comfortably get 13h from a charge),
the hardware compatibility is pretty great; the
touchscreen and hotkeys all seem to work well. I
suppose this isn't actually a feature of Void, and
more a feature of the kernel, but after a long
time running Windows on most of my computers, it
feels positively miraculous to have Linux run this
well on a laptop.
My plan for this evening is to understand in more
detail how to establish a 'runit' service for user
rather than system daemons, and to get to a point
where 'syncthing' runs well. As an experiment I'd
like to use 'syncthing' to move my configuration
over to the Framework laptop when it does arrive,
but we'll see how far I get with that. This kind
of silly tinkering does bring me joy.
