Last Sunday it came to my attention that my laptop was kind of messed up. Physically, it was fine (other than a minor scratch or ding here and there), but when it came to using it, this thing was a mess. It started out as a basic Xubuntu installation last summer, then I tweaked it with a new theme and some other customizations. However, that still wasn't giving me the functionality I was hoping for. So, sometime this spring I installed i3, which I was very familiar with, and I switched out the default xfwm for i3wm using this guide. This meant that I now had the appearance of xfce with the functionality of i3, exactly what I wanted. However, this setup eventually broke and I switched to plain i3 with polybar but was still unsatisfied, especially after running into recurring issues with an old bug where the battery wasn't detected at startup, giving me no battery level indicator at all.
Because of all that, I decided a refresh was in order. Rather than go back to Xubuntu I wanted to play with something new and a bit more esoteric, Void Linux. It's a standalone distro (so it's not built upon one of the more well-known oens) that acts very similar to BSD. It has its own package manager called XBPS, a ports system called XBPS-src, and best of all - no systemd. For someone like me who's still trying to figure out why systemd is good or bad, this seemed like the best way to find out. Leaving it behind meant learning a new init system, runit, and learning if systemd really did cause as many problems as people say it does. Now, given that I don't tinker with my systems too much outside of setting up an environment I like, it might not come into play. However, the little that I have tinkered with Void Linux has been a very good experience.
First, the install process is very straightforward. You download the .iso file, create a live USB, and boot from it. You then start a terminal and run void-installer as root, which kicks off the interactive command-line installer. You get to choose your keyboard layout and locale, then you tell it if you want to install from online sources or the local disk. I chose the latter so I could keep the XFCE environment on the installer, but you can also install from online sources if you want to start from scratch. Then you partition the disks and add filesystems and install the system. Here is where my first issue came up, the virtual filesystem I had been using with Xubuntu. Removing it meant backing out of the installer, then using some man pages to find the right commands to remove the vfs. After that the installation went smoothly. I want to note that I'm trying btrfs rather than sticking with ext4, so we'll see how it plays out in the long run. I don't keep enough critical documents on my laptop for it to be a big deal if it crashes, but I do value some level of stability.
Once the new system was installed I restarted, logged in, and started tweaking. The first thing to change was the window theme, which was easy to do. The Numix theme is included in the standard repo, so a quick xbps-install numix-themes got me everything I needed. I also swapped from the default mouse pointer which looked very Windows ME-ish. A few other visual tweaks and I was generally happy with the way the setup looked. Adding some applications I wanted was more complicated, however. I wanted Discord to communicate with a lot of my friends (given that I'm in college and a lot of us are gamers), and I wanted Steam so I could play a few games. The first was a matter of using the included XBPS-src system to download the correct binaries, then `xbps-install` to put them in the correct locations. Steam was included in the standard repos as well, but I needed a 32-bit library to get it to run. Since I didn't know which one to install I used xbps-query -Rs mesa to see what options I had, then installed glu-32bit, libOSMesa-32bit, and MesaLib-devel-32bit since I didn't know which one had exactly what I wanted. After that Steam ran just fine.
So far the system is looking pretty good. There's two last things that I discovered needed to be added before I had a fully functional laptop, however. First, I needed to install alsa to make my sound work - I don't know why, I just know that nothing I tried with PulseAudio installed worked out. Once I had Alsa installed I rebooted and sound worked normally, including my keyboard shortcuts to adjust sound. Next, I had to install xscreensaver so I could lock my screen. Once again, rebooting enabled it and I was ready to go. I haven't had much time to really play with the system, but so far I'm enjoying it overall. Those who like Arch Linux will probably feel the most comfortable as the package manager has a feel similar to Pacman, especially with `xbps-install -Syu` as the update command. People coming from BSD should also like it as the xbps-src system gives the same functionality as the ports system there, and it allows you to add your own packages to the repository. However, the system will still work great for anyone who's a fan of Linux and isn't afraid to get their hands a bit dirty. So far I haven't had any problems, but I'd love to see what you guys think!