Void Linux
May. 3rd, 2016 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcMy new laptop computer, an Asus Zenbook UX305CA, is working out rather well. While I like my personal laptop to be just right in various respects, so there is plenty of work yet to be done, I have now moved my main day-to-day things over to it.
Void Linux has been a positive experience. I chose it partly because they seem interested in experimenting with worthwhile alternatives, such as LibreSSL (alternative to OpenSSL) and musl (alternative to glibc) and I approve of diversity. It is also pleasantly simple and lightweight so basic Linux knowledge goes a long way; I've even fallen back to twm for now. Void has its own package management system which so far appears to work well and very swiftly. Not all the packages I use are available from the binary repository but, for instance, the XMPP plugin for irssi was easy enough to compile because I could ask for the sources used to build irssi. More packages are available as scripts to build from source than as ready-made binaries, though ghc takes a good while to compile. There have been one or two issues, like how I am not sure that I can define runit services that are not to be started automatically, but nothing annoying, let alone showstopping.
A great thing about Void is how open it is. I never became a Debian developer because when I first looked into it there appeared to be ideological purity testing for which I had no patience, so my few contributions tended to end up as probably forgotten patches attached to bug reports. In contrast, I've already had a small contribution accepted into Void, as it's all on GitHub so it's just a matter of opening a pull request that fits their published guidelines. This certainly beats the OpenBSD approach which seems to be to mail one's diffs to a list and then ping a bit later when nobody picked it up and commented.
I had mentioned the much smaller screen: that was interesting even given my good eyesight. (On normal systems I am a fan of 6×13 fixed.) I calculate that each pixel has sides of length 92μm. The console-based installer I used had positively tiny writing; one of my first tasks once I had the machine online was to install the Terminus font and have setfont thus deliver me a 16×32 font that was actually comfortably readable. In X I'm mostly using 12×24 for now and for applications like Firefox I found that I needed to use xrandr to substantially increase the autoguessed 96 DPI.
Overall the computer's really nice so far; my strongest criticism is that the loudspeakers are rubbish, but from my laptop I'd usually use headphones for sound anyway. Partly it's nice in contrast, though, e.g., to have an actually properly working keyboard again. The replacement is timely: tonight my old laptop fell apart some more, such that I'll be finding its lid some adhesive tape.
Void Linux has been a positive experience. I chose it partly because they seem interested in experimenting with worthwhile alternatives, such as LibreSSL (alternative to OpenSSL) and musl (alternative to glibc) and I approve of diversity. It is also pleasantly simple and lightweight so basic Linux knowledge goes a long way; I've even fallen back to twm for now. Void has its own package management system which so far appears to work well and very swiftly. Not all the packages I use are available from the binary repository but, for instance, the XMPP plugin for irssi was easy enough to compile because I could ask for the sources used to build irssi. More packages are available as scripts to build from source than as ready-made binaries, though ghc takes a good while to compile. There have been one or two issues, like how I am not sure that I can define runit services that are not to be started automatically, but nothing annoying, let alone showstopping.
A great thing about Void is how open it is. I never became a Debian developer because when I first looked into it there appeared to be ideological purity testing for which I had no patience, so my few contributions tended to end up as probably forgotten patches attached to bug reports. In contrast, I've already had a small contribution accepted into Void, as it's all on GitHub so it's just a matter of opening a pull request that fits their published guidelines. This certainly beats the OpenBSD approach which seems to be to mail one's diffs to a list and then ping a bit later when nobody picked it up and commented.
I had mentioned the much smaller screen: that was interesting even given my good eyesight. (On normal systems I am a fan of 6×13 fixed.) I calculate that each pixel has sides of length 92μm. The console-based installer I used had positively tiny writing; one of my first tasks once I had the machine online was to install the Terminus font and have setfont thus deliver me a 16×32 font that was actually comfortably readable. In X I'm mostly using 12×24 for now and for applications like Firefox I found that I needed to use xrandr to substantially increase the autoguessed 96 DPI.
Overall the computer's really nice so far; my strongest criticism is that the loudspeakers are rubbish, but from my laptop I'd usually use headphones for sound anyway. Partly it's nice in contrast, though, e.g., to have an actually properly working keyboard again. The replacement is timely: tonight my old laptop fell apart some more, such that I'll be finding its lid some adhesive tape.
