In July, a new distribution called Odyssey Linux quietly launched with a specific goal: take everything Void Linux does and make it approachable for people who'd never touch a terminal to install their OS. Graphical installer, a custom control center for firewall and service settings, a choice of ready-made desktops — the parts Void itself has never bothered to provide. That a whole separate project exists just to put a friendlier face on Void says something about how solid the foundation underneath it is.
Void has been building that foundation since 2008, when former NetBSD developer Juan "xtraeme" Pardines started it as, of all things, a testbed for a package manager he was writing. That package manager, XBPS, is still what Void runs today — written entirely from scratch, not borrowed or forked from another distro's tooling. Void makes a point of this: unlike the vast majority of Linux distributions, which build on top of Debian, Arch, or Red Hat's plumbing somewhere in their ancestry, Void isn't a derivative of anything. Its package manager and build system are its own, from the ground up.
Two decisions in particular set it apart from almost everything else people run day to day. First, Void uses runit rather than systemd to boot the system and supervise services — a small, unglamorous piece of software that does one job and stays out of the way, chosen years before "systemd-free" became the small but vocal movement it is now. Second, and more unusual still: Void lets you choose, at install time, whether the system runs on glibc or musl — the two competing C library implementations most distros commit to permanently. Maintaining compatibility across both, patching upstream software when the two disagree, is ongoing, unglamorous work that most projects don't bother taking on at all.
The project has also shown it's willing to make a bold technical call and then walk it back when the evidence changes. Void was the first mainstream distribution to ship LibreSSL as its default cryptography library instead of OpenSSL — then reversed that decision in 2021 once the practical costs of the switch (patching software written with OpenSSL's quirks in mind, missing out on newer algorithms) outweighed the benefits. Pragmatism over ideology, in both directions.
None of it is corporate. Void has no company behind it, no funding round, just volunteers pushing changes to a public build system that turns them into binary packages automatically — which is also, fittingly, exactly the kind of project that once produced an April Fools' announcement for a fake "Void Linux: Enterprise Edition," complete with a straight-faced pitch for "ROI optimization." It's the sound of a project entirely sure of what it is.
Source: voidlinux.org