Its a late night tonight as I setup the honors network for a smooth start one last time. Its been a long summer to make a clean startup on Void after migrating off of Ubuntu. Here’s what’s happened.
So Ubuntu is a fine platform and I still would probably recommend it for new Linux users. It worked well for setting up the platform and was a decent system for a long time. Where it fell short was in the usability from an administrative perspective. The packages are ancient, the fact that things are linked against gnutls is a real pain and the community doesn’t have great docs for running Ubuntu in the enterprise. Overall it was time to move on.
About a year ago I started using Void on my personall laptop and desktop. I gained experience with the system and got comfortable using it on my own systems. By this point I’ve had darkstar, the server that hosts this site, running on Void for about a year now. It works really reliably and does what I need, but at the same time there was some question if I could run the Honors fleet on a rolling release distro. Fortunately I have a lot of trust from the staff and Void was an easy pitch to upgrade to given that it would fix the PDF reader issues and bring new software to the lounge.
This slow process has brought me to here, I’m sitting in the lounge with a cleanly running Void network. This is probably the largest single deployment of Void in the world right now. Its pretty cool to get to work out on the bleeding edge of what is possible, but I have over the last year been impressed over and over with Void’s stability. I will be interested to see what the year holds and how the system winds up working.