
Void Linux: Some Context for Recent Events - BlackLotus89
https://voidlinux.org/news/2020/04/some-context.html
======
dTal
It's a shame that Void only seems to get attention when there's some sort of
social drama angle. So let me plug my daily driver of the past several years:

Void is an excellent, excellent distro. It's quite similar to Arch in many
ways, but its binary software repositories are much larger, and include some
quite tricky customers (like FreeCAD). Its package management system is very
advanced. Unlike Arch, shared libraries are tracked, so partial updates are
supported. The "templates" (a BSD-ports-like system, like Arch's PKGBUILDs)
are all kept in a single github repository, which means you can basically fork
the entire distro, make as many changes to as many packages as you need to get
a complex feature working, and - if you like - submit the entire lot back as a
pull request. Distro-on-git - a powerful concept. Package building is
stateless - a clean system is created in a chroot and build dependencies are
automatically installed there. It's not nix, but it's highly practical.

One gets the sense that the whole system was designed with a slightly wistful
eye on the BSDs. systemd is eschewed in favor of the lightweight runit. ZFS
support is first class. The repositories, in addition to all the standard
Linux stuff, contain lots of little BSD hints - yes, you can install
pulseaudio, but you can also install sndiod. You can install sudo, but also
doas. Heck, you can even run the entire system off musl, instead of glibc. The
system feels like a small voice of rebellion against the tide of bloat in
Linux-land. "It doesn't have to be this way, you know...", it seems to want to
say.

And yet, if you want all that bloaty Linuxy stuff, it's there and it works
brilliantly. I run Plasma 5 on my laptop and it's computing nirvana. I won't
say it's rock-solid - rolling distros never are - but the simplicity and
elegance of the system clearly yields stability dividends. And the core
developers are, quite honestly, shit-hot - and friendly too, if you stop by
the #voidlinux IRC channel on Freenode.

What's not to love?

~~~
jack1243star
Since you also mentioned, how does it compare to NixOS? IIRC it is also a
distro-on-git(hub), with stronger guarantees on separating package
dependencies?

------
emkemp
It appears Juan RP is having some problems.

[https://twitter.com/xtraemeat](https://twitter.com/xtraemeat)

~~~
squarefoot
Apparently his gf brought their daughters away from him, and he had to spend
some time fighting in court. This struck on me because I have a friend in the
same situation, and he is desperate to the point we fear for him to go
suicidal. Using kids as a weapon against the ex partner is just evil.

Now, unless Juan is violent to them, forcing the daughters not to contact or
see him, especially if they suddenly become hostile to him, it would be a case
of parental alienation, which he should fight against in court since it also
hurts the kids.

~~~
Igelau
This whole thing may have ignited when one of the maintainers put an entry in
the fortunes file that made fun of that: [https://github.com/void-linux/void-
packages/commit/c3b796aca...](https://github.com/void-linux/void-
packages/commit/c3b796acace52e275ff069347c21000f48138f28)

Smells to me like they deliberately set him off so they'd have an excuse to
stage a coup. Could be wrong, but this distro looks like it's maintained by a
den of vipers and I'm sure as hell not going near it.

~~~
resfirestar
No, that particular commit was in the aftermath. xtraeme's angry tweets
started at 7:40 PDT, access to infrastructure was cut off at 8:40, and that
commit was at 9:32. The individual who made the commit apologized on reddit
and said it wasn't intended as a reference to xtraeme's personal situation.
Terrible form though and certainly didn't help matters, but I think the
outcome was determined by that point.

~~~
Igelau
That's kind of true? The one that made the divorce crack apologized and seems
to have an innocent enough explanation. Look again though, the one that
actually made the commit (Vaelatern) is trying to be sly by saying they just
found it amusing, and only going so far as to say they "support the decision"
to revert it.

While this couldn't have set it off timeline-wise, it paints a picture that
someone was trying to goad him into going too far.

------
throwaway_ptr
> Second, I never left void voluntarily. My relationship had a breakup and I
> had to be in the court for some time, fighting for my daughters... and it
> ended up with me being alone. [1]

> ahesford: Anybody feel like a child whose parents are getting a divorce? [2]

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/g2l9ws/thoughts_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/g2l9ws/thoughts_on_juans_xtraeme_recent_rants/fns92jp)

[2] [https://github.com/void-linux/void-
packages/commit/bbb8bc557...](https://github.com/void-linux/void-
packages/commit/bbb8bc557d8661665c7f7becc5edb0cb3a440ce3)

Someone please should give Juan RP a hug or something.

> Now, unless Juan is violent to them, forcing the daughters not to contact or
> see him, especially if they suddenly become hostile to him, it would be a
> case of parental alienation, which he should fight against in court since it
> also hurts the kids.

------
yjftsjthsd-h
Well... That's truly unfortunate, but on a pragmatic level it really shouldn't
be an issue; Void, by necessity, is no longer dependent on any one person
after the last time he left. I'd only worry if it implied deeper
organizational issues, which is possible but I don't see any obvious evidence.

------
resfirestar
I use Void as my main desktop OS and I wasn't aware that xtraeme was back or
that he was causing problems. My gratitude to the developers working to keep
the distribution stable even in difficult times.

------
0x8BADF00D
The beauty of open source is that if you find a project's maintainers lacking
in some way, you can always fork the project. When the fork becomes more
popular, it can lead to changes in the original.

~~~
LEARAX
Well, here the (original) maintainer is the one doing the forking, so there's
a bit of a twist.

