A while ago I read about this cool distro called Chimera Linux and I really loved the idea. However, this distro is still under heavy development and it’s not ready for production yet, from what I understand they haven’t released a beta yet. I tried the GNOME install before in a VM and it was nice because the install was as minimal as GNOME can go with that cool APK package manager which I can’t wait to try. Also this distro used a different init system which is Dinit, I never used this one before so I tried to read a bit more about it to later find out that it was kinda similar to Runit. Everything sounded good but the fact that the distro wasn’t ready yet wasn’t helping my “distro hopping” nerves calm down, so I started thinking about leaving Void, but I really had my reasons this time.
XBPS ain’t doing it for me Anymore Link to heading
See XBPS can be one of the best things about Void Linux, it’s such a stable package manger compared to Pacman and it’s got a strong community of devs making it better each and everyday, I can’t deny the great effort the devs are putting on developing this package manager, but also I can’t deny the fact that it is very poor, slow and sometimes it’s neither a rolling release nor a stable release. No matter how minimal you are you’ll be missing some packages on Void Linux, and the fact that it doesn’t support parallel download can be annoying sometimes, I’m used to that feature from when I was an Arch user. And if the availability of packages wasn’t enough of a problem to you supporting their latest updates might be a big one, the latest version of KDE Plasma hasn’t been added to the XBPS repos until a few days ago and the latest GNOME version ain’t even their yet which is insane, at this point Void can’t keep claiming it’s a rolling release distro anymore.
I Need to Get Used to Dinit before Chimera Comes Out Link to heading
I love Runit and all but after I tried Dinit I think it’s the best option for me, it’s minimal and it’s a bit easier to deal with, and if I’m serious about moving to Chimera I think that I need to spend a good amount of time getting used to it.
Intel Drivers Link to heading
For reasons I understand Void doesn’t ship all the Intel drivers you might need, only the open source drivers are available so you’ll be missing a ton of functionality. For me it was with FFMPEG since I could screen cast using my GPU instead of my CPU which is kinda annoying, and I think it’s causing my gaming experience to be a bit worse.
Anyways for these reasons and more I ended up installing Artix Linux with Dinit on my hardware and it didn’t go so great, I didn’t know that many of the programs that I use ain’t available in the Pacman repos, and Artix was missing more packages than native Arch which I couldn’t find in the Chaotic AUR. I really didn’t want to use an AUR helper since I always had issues with those and I think it’s only Artix related issues. So if I’m going to be fair about going back to Arch I should do it with the vanilla version, which something I don’t think I’mma be doing anytime soon since well, it comes with systemd. So yeah… I’m still looking for a Distro, and a Browser, but we’ll save that story to the next post, thanks for your time friend. Farewell!
Seth.