I vote for voidlinux - I have no idea why, but I get almost double the battery life compared to fedora. No doubt it’s something stupid I’ve done on fedora but - I just love void.
I vote for voidlinux - I have no idea why, but I get almost double the battery life compared to fedora. No doubt it’s something stupid I’ve done on fedora but - I just love void.
voidlinux on my laptop (from Fedora) - why? I wanted to see what a systemd-less distro was like nowadays. I have used Linux since 1992 and Unix since 1984 so I’m used to SysVinit. What I find with voidlinux is a system I can understand easily - not that I struggle with systemd, but I felt there was just so much happening under the hood, just too clever by half. If I wanted MacOS, I’d have bought an Apple.
The packaging system on voidlinux is sooooo much faster than fedora. The really weird thing is that my battery life almost doubled. I can’t explain it except to say that the laptop is much calmer than under fedora, which seems to run the fan constantly. Same workload, CPU governers, powertop tweaks etc etc - but battery life almost doubled.
The one downside is a smaller array of packages in the repositories. But since I’m happy installing from source for those few corner cases, it’s no biggie.
I’ve left fedora on my media/file server for now as I still do some fedora packaging (mainly for sway related packages).
Link for the video?
As a general rule of thumb, I’ve been told that anything less than a 50% performance boost is hardly noticeable.
I’ve also heard (but ready to stand corrected) that mitigation costs only about 10% CPU (depending on the CPU).
I don’t get out of bed for a 10% performance boost.
I’ve been using a Dell XPS L502X with fedora since it was delivered 10/8/2011. No real problems, but I recently moved to voidlinux and almost doubled my battery life. Dell put quite a lot of time into supporting linux.
If you want to try living without systemd, take a look at voidlinux - it uses runit instead. I made the jump from Fedora recently and I love it! Linux is once again the unix system I loved for 40+ years - it’s rational, easy to understand and just works! As an added bonus, I do believe I get about 50% more life out of the battery (less busy-work going on?). What do I miss from systemd? Nothing really.
I’ve just bounced into voidlinux and I’m very impressed by how complete* it is and how snappy. So that’s not a very objective measure, but my (old) battery life has jumped from 1.5h on fedora-38 to 2h+ under void (very similar workload). I think that’s an indication of how light-on the hardware the OS is - perhaps it’s because it’s not running systemd. If you’re looking to squeeze more out of your hardware, take a look at void!
* the only thing missing from my manifest is mythtv - firefox, libreoffice, emacs syncthing etc and it’s all the latest
Rock solid on my 11-yo laptop that has been running fedora and updated every 6 months since I bought it in 2012.
I’ve always updated late in the fedora cycle - maybe that’s the go.
gtklock for sway/wayland
What for? Even if they have improvements in some areas, the original POSIX standard utilities will continue to be needed for script compatibility. You’re not going to swap them out - at best you can add them and then you just have an additional code base to support with additional attack surface to protect.