Void Linux: Some Context for Recent Events

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.

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.

a bit of a tragic read there.

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?

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.