I May Never Be Able to Leave the Void #ThinkPad #Linux #VoidLinux #Shorts

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Transcript

A couple of things I did a little too much over the last few years were restoring computers and then setting them up with Void Linux. What could be looked at as a waste of time helped me achieved several things:

• it helped me identify how different those 50+ machines were from each other
• it helped me perfect my Linux setup as many of those needed some or the other optimization
• it taught me Linux at a level that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise

While Arch Linux was my first command-line install, trying to set up and install Debian and later Void Linux the same way helped me gain an interesting perspective. With Void Linux, particularly, I could gain control over even finer details about my setup and make it even leaner. While the Void community is in magnitudes smaller than that of Arch, the community members here are inversely more helpful than the BTW crowd and that played well in my favor.

The setup only got better with time, and it continues to do so. A few major recent refinements include a switch from LUKS1 to LUKS2 for data encryption, a better compression algorithm for BTRFS subvolumes, a separate /boot volume for much faster LUKS decryption at boot, a more scalable partition map for my storage drives, a prettier decryption prompt using Plymouth, switch from Thunderbird and Firefox to Betterbird and LibreWolf, a bridge to connect to my primary setup from a secondary setup like Fedora, a better network backend for NetworkManager, and that’s only to list a few.

Now, this is in no way intended to alienate new Linux users by making them think that everyone needs to spend years to achieve a Linux setup that works for them, but instead just to practically demonstrate the scale of freedom that comes with Linux, which is something that is not even remotely possible with other major operating systems like macOS, let alone Windows.

While everything that I’ve implemented for myself has been done keeping it as platform-independent as possible, the more time I spend in the Void, and the more challenges I overcome here, the harder it becomes to step out into other options that interest me, like NixOS.

On the other hand, I've experimented with Nobara Linux on notebooks, desktops, and servers, and it didn't disappoint me on either of them.

So, are you the type that would rather go with an out-of-the-box configured distribution like Nobara, or would you be patient enough and give it time and effort to customize a minimal distribution like Void for your own unique requirement?