Introduction
I recently got my brother's laptop in my custody as it was getting too hot. It was running Linux Mint and he didn't do anything which was resource intensive. The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A355. It has an Intel Centrino CPU, 4GB RAM and a 300GB HDD. I really wanted to install something lightweight in that machine so that it would not heat up that much.
Struggling in the midst of thousands of distros
I first thought to go the easy route and I did. I installed Arch linux because I use it on my main machine and I was confident enough about my skills. After installing Arch, it ran fine. It had a 232MB footprint when idle and I was quite happy with it. But still I was not satisfied. So after about a week or so, I started researching about interesting linux distributions. I came across NixOS, Artix Linux, Gentoo, and also Voidlinux (who would've guessed that).
I started by taking a look at NixOS because I was really interested in the nix package manager. I recently tried experimenting with NixOS in my main machine as well, but that did not go so good. So I was a little hesitant but then decided go for it. The installation process was very smooth and I got myself a fully-working system with the i3 window manager installed after about an hour or so. But due to obvious reasons, NixOS was taking a lot of memory when the system was at rest. It was taking about 463MiB and I was not quite happy with that.
I then tried to install Gentoo because I wanted to try it. I used the Artix Linux Live Image for the installation of Gentoo. I followed the Gentoo WiKi till the part where the kernel was compiled. And of course the problem was the compile times. My laptop was running fans on full blast but still was about to compile about two programs at a time. So yeah, I aborted the installation and tried to look for something else. Also before the installation of NixOS, I tried Artix Linux but due to the package inavailability, I tried to look for something new (After formatting my drive, I then realised that you can add the arch repositories in artix, :( ).
Entering the Void
Next, I tried Void linux. I was really interested in void, because I had heard a lot about their package manager and wanted to give it a try. So of course I downloaded the void base iso and started the installation. The ISO launched, and I was greeted with a tty. I launched void-installer and started going through the installation. I hit a hurdle when it was time for configuring the network. I use WiFi, and I know that it is recommended to connect to a network but it is not feasible to do so in my house. So, I decided to install it with WiFi. When I came to the network section, I chose my wifi adapter and it asked me to configure a wifi network. I gave my network's SSID, encryption type and passphrase. But, when I clicked Ok (or whatever it is, I don't remember), It told that my Network was inaccessible. I was really disappointed and was about to leave void for good as well. But, I thought to try one more time and it worked! I don't know what is happening but it happened to me just the other day when I was installing Void on that laptop again (wait, I will explain). The rest of the installation went smoothly, and I had acquired my first Voidlinux system. I went ahead to update my system and install some basic utilities, but then I discovered that my internet was not working properly. I tried using nmcli but I discovered that it was not using NetworkManager. I tried to look for tutorials on how to use wpa_supplicant to connect to a network. After a lot of head banging, I got my network working. Then, the first thing I did was install NetworkManager and set it up. But it stopped working and was giving me some errors about an object not found. I was really tired that day and I decided to reinstall my system instead of troubleshooting and go ahead with wpa_supplicant.
So the next day, I installed void again. I had gone through a void installation in a virtual machine before starting it on hardware and I discovered that there are a lot of dependencies which xbps does not install when trying to compile dwm, dmenu and st. So I followed a tutorial by a youtube channel called jake@linux and I at last had a working system working in void linux.
XBPS and Void Linux
The first few days were flawless and I had a very good time. The startup time was just so good. It was really night and day compared to systemd. The footprint of the system was also really small. About 110 MiB when at rest. I was extremely happy with that. The XBPS package manager was also so good. The commands are so intuitive and I loved it. But then the problem of package inavailability arised. I use Librewolf for my web browser which is not there in the void's official repository. To mitigate this problem, I installed the Nix package manager. And lo and behold, I was getting more than 80,000 packages at my disposal with just a single command.
Thoughts
Overall, I really liked Voidlinux and I think I will switch my main machine to void as well. But, that's for another time. If you want to know that is it worth it, then I think that it is definitely worth it and you should definitely give VoidLinux a try!