About

Welcome to the Void Handbook! Please be sure to read the "About ThisHandbook" section to learn how to use thisdocumentation effectively. A local copy of this handbook, in several formats,can beinstalled via thevoid-docs package and accessedwith thevoid-docs(1) utility.

Void is an independent,rollingrelease Linux distribution,developed from scratch rather than as a fork, with a focus on stability overbleeding-edge. Inaddition, there are several features that make Void unique:

• TheXBPS package manager, which isextremely fast, developed in-house, and performs checks when installingupdates to ensure that libraries are not changed to incompatible versionswhich can break dependencies.
• Themusl libc, which focuses on standards complianceand correctness, has first class support. This allows us to build certaincomponents for musl systems statically, which would not be practical on glibcsystems.
• runit is used forinit(8) and service supervision. Thisallows Void to support musl as a second libc choice, which would not bepossible withsystemd.A side effect of this decision is a core system with clean and efficientoperation, and a small code base.

Void is developed in the spare time of a handful of developers, and is generallyconsidered stable enough for daily use. We do this for fun and hope that ourwork will be useful to others.

The name "Void" comes from the C literalvoid. It was chosen rather randomly,and is void of any meaning.