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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • 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).





  • 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