Avoid - A Void Linux Distribution

I wanted a minimal system that I could use for build machines and occasional recovery. It was frustratingly difficult to find something that fit the bill; every distribution I tested felt bloated. Even “server” variants often came with more than I needed.

The Quest for Minimalism

After trying several options, I eventually settled on Void Linux. I had considered Debian, but systemd felt too heavy for my tastes. Once you experience true minimalism, it’s hard to go back. I even tried Devuan (a systemd-free fork of Debian), but it didn’t feel quite right—there was too much “magic” happening behind the scenes.

I also experimented with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, specifically the QEMU image. While relatively small, something still felt “off”—likely the presence of systemd again.

Why Void?

So, I decided to build a custom distribution based on Void. The primary issue with standard Void is that it’s geared toward desktop users. It includes many unnecessary firmware blobs for things like Wi-Fi and sound that have no place on a server or build box.

While I haven’t gone as far as building a custom kernel yet (the modules remain for now), I’ve stripped out most of the unnecessary packages.

What I love about Void is the tooling. xchroot in particular makes the setup process incredibly smooth. The package management isn’t convoluted; it’s easy to query dependencies, list files, and understand what’s happening on your system. Void follows a philosophy of minimalism that resonates with me, but it lacked a dedicated server-first implementation.

The documentation is also a breath of fresh air: clean, straightforward, and centralized, unlike many other distros where information is scattered across fragmented wikis.

Building “Avoid”

In keeping with the minimalist theme, I avoided using their high-level tools like mklive. Instead, I took a hands-on approach with a custom build script. Honestly, it’s much simpler and gives me total control over the environment.

The process involved the usual suspects: sparse files, zerofilling, and the standard chroot installation routine.

Currently, the releases are automated via GitHub Actions. It was tricky to get the pipeline stable, but it’s fully functional now. I’m providing a .qcow2 image that’s ready to boot.

Results and Next Steps

I’m really pleased with the performance. The system boots incredibly fast, consumes only about 300MB of RAM, and runs a very small number of processes. I’ve also included some minimalistic defaults for Zsh (the default user shell), and sh is symlinked to dash for speed.

The next step is to create a container image and use that to build the distribution itself. For now, I’m very happy with the result.

Check out the project here: github.com/sku0x20/avoid