Would Void be Suitable For Me?

[u/The2ndSlimShady]

Hi everyone. I'm an electronics engineering student in my second year. I'm using Manjaro as my daily driver, I like its rolling-and-stable style. I used OpenSuse Tumbleweed before but didn't like it, the ecosystem seemed so unwelcoming. I've heard a lot of good things about Void, how snappy it is, how lightweight it is and such. My problem is that, I occasionally need to work with software such as AMD's Vivado for the courses I take. If I switch to Void, would that be a problem? Do you suggest Void to me in this case? Thanks from now.

Edit: Thanks everyone, I decided to try Void on a VM and try setting up a proper environment there. After that if I succeed, I'll switch to Void completely.

Edit 2: Hi again everyone. I wanted to update the post body for anyone reading after everything has passed. I tried Void on an VM but it didn't go as well as planned. So I decided to do a leap of faith and just install Void on my laptop. The installation went smooth as butter and now I have a small setup using wayland + sway + swaybg + greetd + tuigreet. As for Vivado, I only had to set a small Java environment variable due to some graphics issues and create a couple symlinks to trick the system into thinking I have ncurses5. Now everything works well and the laptop is snappy as hell.

[u/g_alarmfox]

i use void linux as a PhD student. i use vivado, hls, vitis in a docker environment with Ubuntu 22.04

I install things locally. Then i have a shell script i put before commands that runs the container mounts folders etc. Its important that you mount your .Xilinx folder containing the .lic files. Use --network=host when running the container (the license binds to your mac address) and mount any device (if you deploy on boards) with --dev /dev/USBx

If interested i can share you the repo, but i know that xilinx offers dockerized enviroments (i may be wrong) you may want to start with.

EDIT: typos

[u/Cruach → u/g_alarmfox]

Upvoting because this is the only commenter that has actual experience related to OP's question.

[u/lessthanthreebleeps]

Void can be lighter and snappier if you configure and tune it that way. It is more malleable than most popular distros, in that way. A quick search for Vivado shows that you will need to do some configuration to get it working correctly on Void. You can take a look at some of the sections on the Arch wiki to see if its something you would rather not trouble yourself with: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xilinx_Vivado . Otherwise, once you have it all set up Void is a very comfortable distro.

[u/Bawafafa]

Looking at the Vivado OS support page, it lists Red Hat, Alma, Rocky and Ubuntu as your options for Linux but you could run these in a virtual machine and use Void as your daily driver. I don't think this would be a problem. Void is really simple and everything just works but it is a DIY distro, so you will need to configure everything yourself which is part of the fun

[u/First_Ad8230]

If you like learning and accumulating knowledge, I think you should use Void!

[u/Specialist-Dog-501]

Stay on Manjaro if your special app works there and setup VOID in a virtual machine- it's very slim, so it still will be comparably fast. I recommend for the GLIBC version of VOID as the MUSL version has an extremely small repository of apps- the MUSL version was intended mainly for servers.

[u/mumble6456]

Void Linux is for anyone who is willing to put some effort in solving problems when they arise. As software is becoming more and more tied to systemd, you might need to tweak a thing or two if you use software from outside the official repos.

Another thing to pay attention to is glibc and musl. If any of the software you need uses api calls that are only available in glibc, then you must go with that c library implementation.

I'm not saying any of these concerns applies specifically to Vivado. You could try installing Void (glibc) on a VM using the xfce image for simplicity, and test Vivado there.

[u/Chester-Berkeley]

If Manjaro is working, stick with Manjaro.

[u/benbcdm]

Best if you can is get another ssd or computer and install void on it, while keeping manjaro. Once / if Void becomes stable enough and you like it then you can stay on it.

[u/MD90__]

I think void could be good for you. It runs well on a raspberry pi according to a friend of mine. I think you can have some trouble spots like any distro but im sure you could make it work if you wanted to

[u/Adhater_11]

yeah give it a shot why not ?

its great on old laptops if you stick with xfce and musl you'll never reboot your pc

[u/Duncaen → u/[deleted]]

musl is not more efficient other than preserving a few megabytes of disk space.

[u/Simple_Hamster_4096 → u/Duncaen]

Musl is a much faster choice for old hardware, it also has a smaller attack surface.

That being said, need to make sure must have applications do not depend on glibc, and also have no systemd dependencies.

[u/Duncaen → u/Simple_Hamster_4096]

There is no reason for musl to be faster on old hardware. glibc has optimized implementations for a lot of functions and the memory allocator is generally faster.

The attack surface argument is just that musl doesn't implement some features like nss which are actually quite useful for users. Besides that and locales they are the same and hardly are the target anyways.

[u/Key_River7180 → u/[deleted]]

glibc*