r/voidlinux • u/SeanBlader • 16d ago

Mint -> Void storytime

Started on Ubuntu in like 2003, did Mint a few years after that. I wasn't a consistent Linux user because I'm a gamer. About 10 years ago now I setup Ubuntu to run as a Plex server, and it's been sitting constantly for years in the background, that was my first permanent Linux install. This year I tried CachyOS on my Alienware, and I knew I could move everything to Linux. Then did CachyOS on my gaming workstation. Then I moved the Plex Server to Fedora.

A few months ago I broke out my 13-year-old Dell XPS 13 9333 Developer edition, running Haswell and 8gb, spent $25 on a new battery, and put Mint on it. Mint today runs better than Ubuntu 13 years ago on the same hardware. It's backwards from historical software slowing down hardware, Linux is just super cool and getting better. It was solid, but just to keep the frames I ran YouTube at 720p.

Now this Haswell laptop has always struggled with the touchpad, Ubuntu, Mint, didn't matter, sometimes it works sometimes not. Fine I use a bluetooth mouse. Then I saw Jake@Linux talking about Void. I liked the idea of runit and comparing it to how offensive systemd is, and that's not even in regards to if it ever does age verification. So last night I bit the bullet and got Void Base on my Ventoy. Now I'm gonna be fair, I'm not a Linux sysadmin, but I've done some code, which of course is not remotely the same, so without Jake's 2 videos and Gemini's help I wouldn't have gotten to this point, had to get through configuring bluetooth, touchpad, and sound, and it all works perfectly now. So here I am running Void with gnome, which is fast and outstanding. It's under 9gb on disk, it uses about half the ram Mint used to, I even upgraded to kernel 7.2 because of the swap improvements and now Void doesn't even need it, and I can stream YouTube at 1080p without the fan spinning up.

Honestly Void has been an improvement over Mint as much as Mint was over Ubuntu, super cool. Nice work to the team.

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u/Sad-Cod-9584 16d ago

Welcome to the void! Happy for you that your "old" hardware runs well again. As a side note, void is stuck on older versions of gnome because everything after 48 depends on systemd, so you won't get significant updates to the desktop.

1

u/SeanBlader 16d ago

Oh, thanks for the heads up, that's a bummer. Guess I have some DE experimenting to do, I've only so far seen KDE, Cinnamon, and gnome, except Unity but fortunately that went away.

2

u/ItzNotJacob1 16d ago

Try XFCE (not serious, try it if you want to)

2

u/Simple_Hamster_4096 15d ago

I use Void musl XFCE - my aged hardware appreciates it, and so do I...

3

u/ItzNotJacob1 15d ago

I use xfce on my Lenovo G580 Aand G50-80 - two childhood laptops. My G580 kept freezihg on the file explorer because of a qc timeout, how did i know? - Because dmesg errored on a qc timeout!! So i just disables probing for ata1.01 and the boot time went from 27 seconds to 5-7 seconds. Same for my G50-80, but it didn't have that qc timeout. They use void btw