openSUSE vs Void Linux?
 

Hi all,

I've been on endeavourOS for almost a year now, and while there are certain things I've loved about it (the arch wiki, the aur, pacman, etc) the growing instability of my system over time has started to annoy me. After some looking around, I've found two new distros that interest me, and, as the title suggests, those two are openSUSE Tumbleweed and Void Linux.

Void seems neat, as it's lightweight with a really fast package manager (that's binary which seems soooo much nicer than compiling as much as possible), however it's relatively obscure which would make troubleshooting a bit more difficult, plus KDE (which is the de I use) isn't officially supported. On the other hand, Tumbleweed has KDE as basically their flagship and also can also easily be installed alongside Windows, however I've heard (and seen on a vm) that zypper can be really slow which seems like it would be painful to live with after enjoying pacman for so long.

So yeah, insight on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

IME, zypper is not only not slow, it's also the friendliest package manager I've ever used, my clear favorite. Those I can recall that I've used: apt, apt-get, aptitude, dpkg, yum, dnf, urpmi, rpm, ipkg and zypper. Zypper may be found to be slow by some people for whom mirrors are the actual problem. Some areas simply don't have reliable mirrors reasonably nearby, which is partially a function of maintaining a mirror of its size and turnover rate. Another complaint about zypper speed could be related to this package turnover. Each release of TW, which can occur as often as twice in a single day, constitutes a new release. Those who do not upgrade daily, but rather put it off for a month or more at a time, can find with some frequency half or more of their installed packages get replaced in one upgrade session. If package turnover is a problem for you, better to choose openSUSE Leap than Tumbleweed. Don't let its apparent kernel version bother you. It's loaded with backports of support for newer hardware than was supported when the nominal version was fresh, plus all security updates.

openSUSE has constant hiccups (that it hangs) in Firefox. On Void Linux, I have never seen this problem.

A second thing I notice is that Firefox starts up almost twice as fast on Void Linux than on openSUSE. You can time this exactly with the 'time' command.

Void Linux is underrated for what it is. Void is overall a distro that deserves to be in the top 3 best Linux systems of 2023.