I took Void for a spin on my desktop because, as much as I like OpenBSD, I do occasionally need to touch stuff that's Linux-only. It's like a breath of fresh air, really. I can go about and mind my own business, as if all the mind-boggling complexity that's been steadily poured into the Linux cup during the last 3-5 years or so has been nicely tucked away under the rug or just thrown out.

Not having systemd isn't such a big deal to me, but it helps. I had to learn it at $work a while ago so it doesn't baffle me anymore. I get why it's so appreciated by DevOps and software outsourcing companies, but it doesn't do anything I need. I can live with it (and I have), but it helps if I don't need to.

Gentoo is great, but with Linux land being the way it is lately, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's not very familiar with it. Asking someone to get a working system with Grub 2, xdg-* and the like using nothing but the Gentoo handbook and the Gentoo forum is more or less the equivalent of sending someone to fight World War II with a fork.

Likewise, Void takes some getting used to, though - meaning its package manager (I was used to apt-get).

The manual partitioning also was quite cumbersome for me, even though I've done a lot of fdisk fiddling when I was younger. The main issue for me was the lack of clear documentation regarding this phase [1]. However, I took it as a "forced learning" opportunity and spend a day fiddling with it until I got it working, from which point onward it really is a fast and lean system to work with, very BSD-ish in style, that doesn't get in your way. I love it. My only alternative nowadays would be Manjaro-OpenRC.

[1]: If I remember correctly, you can screw up the rest of the partition management step if you select the incorrect "label type" (gpt or dos), with no clear way to revert your selection.

> The manual partitioning also was quite cumbersome for me, even though I've done a lot of fdisk fiddling when I was younger. The main issue for me was the lack of clear documentation regarding this phase [1].

The way I do it, lately, and for pretty much any Linux system I use, is to just use LVM for everything except the /boot partition which I leave unencrypted. I think you can have an encrypted /boot but with Grub 2 being the way it is, I don't want to bother with it, my threat model is pretty much thieves stealing my computer, I don't need much plausible deniability.

The only install-time inconvenience with this is that the manpages for LVM-family commands (lv, pv, vg*) are nothing short of terrible. They're pretty much the equivalent of the // add 1 to i comments next to i++.

You don't necessarily "screw up" if you pick the "wrong" label type. You can actually convert between the two (e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fdisk#Convert_between_M... ) . Also, I don't know if the functionality was eventually merged, but a while ago, you had to be careful to use the "correct" set of utils for the partition table type you used (e.g. fdisk for MBR, gdisk for GTP, cfdisk for MBR, cgdisk for GPT and so on)..

It's probably better to look at the Arch/Gentoo documentation for partitioning. The void wiki should probably be updated to point to some of those wikis. There is a lot of crossover in the Gentoo/Arch dev communities.