synth-ruiner another rolling-release distro I forgot about is Void Linux. anyone have any experience with it? looks a little bare-bones but maybe that's a good thing.

Void is very bare-bones. Without a strong background it would be hard to manage Void. I'd say that Void is like Arch, how it was around 2005, not now.

Void offers ready-to-use ISOs with various DEs. But installed systems are just a bit more than a pure terminal. Freshly installed Cinnamon = 3G. Freshly installed Mate = 2G. No preinstalled tools, no software of any kind, no systemd, no running services, no graphical package managers, nothing is pre-configured. It's up to user to build a system from ground up.

You get nude and crude terminal governed by xbps. Like vanilla Arch with pacman only. It's just luxurious.

There's no systemd in Void, so I can't measure exact boot times, but Void roughly boots up twice as fast as Arch. Seems impossible, but the impression persists on each boot.

Void uses runit as init and supervisor subsystem. A user isn't forced to learn Poetteringish to break through the maze of a confusing systemd. Runit is clean, logical, simple to manage. All services, daemons - much less than in systemd - are under a full user's control, at any time.

I run Arch since 2005, so building a system from scratch with CLI is not a problem, but a few times Void has made me to desperate. I hated Void at those moments, but a day later was returning back to it. Reward and satisfaction are enormous when you make Void to run as you wish.

Even when you get a fully working Void system it doesn't grow up too much. Void Cinnamon, started from 3G, grew up to 4G+ here.

Arch is tediously stable. Only Debian Stable is as stable as Arch. I was bored with it, so started to look for new adventures, preferably similar to those in vanilla Arch.

Void seems to be the only competitor for Arch. It's very enjoyable system.

      just thanks for the perspective! I am pretty curious to try it out- maybe in a VM or on one of my lesser-used computers.

        14 days later

        KDE Neon and Debian Stable (with Openbox). Two best distros I've used. So far.

        I think Solus Budgie, Solus Mate or perhaps Solus Plasma. So far I will stick to Solus Gnome.

        Pop OS or ubuntu budgie.
        Maybe reborn os or endeavor. But I really prefer something more stable as ubuntu rather something edge like arch

        Ubuntu gnome on Wayland bcoz it's so freaking smooth.

        I have a Ubuntu Budgie/Win 10 dual boot running happily together on the desktop and only Solus Budgie on the laptop. UB lead me to Solus.

        8 days later

        Pop! 😅 As I had to use Debian for my projects when I was in university. Then I went to ubuntu due to ease of access. Right now I have Win10+Solus+Pop!_OS.
        (Solus being me daily driver, Windows 10 for windows specific sw and Pop! for backup )

        Hmm, tough choice. I'm not a distro-hopper, but I do move around when I have a reason to.

        I came to Solus from Manjaro. Before that I was running MX. I really liked MX, but even as a rolling distro, app versions were a bit too far behind for me and new versions were a bit to slow to be added to the repo's for my liking.

        I will say that Solus has been the only distro that I have ever tried where all of the software I needed was quickly and easily found.

        I've never used eopkg before, but I didn't have any issues picking it up and using after scanning the man page once.

        I've only been using Solus for a couple of days, but so far so good !!!

        2 months later

        salexandarz Manjaro definitely

        Yeah, Manjaro was pretty good, IMHO. For many of the same reasons that make Solus so good, but not nearly so well executed.

          I was using Fedora before Solus and would still be using it if not for Solus lol
          Having had a chance to get familiar with Budgie, I'd wish that Fedora offered a Budgie Spin though.

          manjaro although it feels a bit like randomly thrown together stuff in the hope that it will work compared to solus, but still good. oh, and unlike solus it detected and automatically installed my samsung ml-2165w printer

          Been using Solus (KDE) on my laptop for over a year now, so I'm happy. On my desktop running 24/7 SolydK is a reliable OS, so of course SolydK and all the more so, because F2FS and NILFS2 file systems are also available. Third would me MX Linux and PCLinuxOS coming in fourth. Fifth? Oh yes, Win10 or KDE Neon.


          Or otherwise I go back to Evolve 1.0. I still have the ISO-CD. No problem.

          Solus was my 8th distro in the past year, and I don't think I'll use anything else as long as it's maintained. I like that the various Ubuntu flavors have the backing of Canonical, but all except Xubuntu felt so heavy compared to a lot of others. I really enjoyed Elementary and Zorin, but Mint worked good on my hardware too.

          1. Elementary
          2. Zorin
          3. Peppermint
          4. Mint
          5. Endless

          Probably Elementary if not Ubuntu. The other lightweight distros have not been working for me. Solus has been the only distro that I liked aesthetically and also operationally functional from the box. Some components break here and there after updates but that comes with ANY os. Also, Solus community has been phenomenal with support for the OS. Have not had a single issue not resolved after bringing it up here in the forums.