this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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This is not an answer or recommendation btw, just chiming in my 2c as an Arch and Fedora user who's tried Void for a while.
From what I've experienced, there was no visible difference in the startup/shutdown speed (compared to Arch). This was on a Zen 4 mini PC, with a Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe. But I suspect it'll be the same for anyone who's on any modern system with an NVMe drive. But, if you're on an older PC with a spinning disk or limited RAM, you might notice a difference. But both Void and Arch were visibly faster at startup/shutdown compared to Fedora, but we're only talking about a couple of seconds here. Again, on an NVMe, startup/shutdown speeds shouldn't really be relevant these days, unless there's some bug or misconfiguration slowing down your init.
I definitely do like the idea of using musl over the bloated glibc, but there's still far too many programs out there dependent on it, so you won't be able to get rid of glibc completely on a full-fledged desktop.
The package manager (xbps) wasn't visibly faster compared to pacman either (especially with pacman's parallel downloads). Also, I missed the unique features found in certain AUR helpers, like pikaur, which showed the latest Arch news and package comments.
However xbps is definitely a lot faster than the current dnf on Fedora, although that gap may close with dnf5 - which you can install if you want to. I haven't tested dnf5 yet though so can't comment on it. The xtools features in Void were pretty nifty, but in saying that, the lack of them on other distros wasn't that big of a dealbreaker.
Finally, for me, ultimately what I'm after is performance, and Arch with x86-64-v4 packages and the BORE scheduler performed much better overall compared to vanilla Void (or Fedora for that matter). If Void had x86-64-v4 as well, I might consider using it as one of my primary distros, but at present, I'd relegate it to niche scenarios where system resources are limited.
If you want to use Void without transitioning, just install it in a VM and give it a good try. With the state of KVM these days there's very little performance overhead and you can definitely daily-drive Void inside a VM, and then form your own conclusions as to whether its worth switching or not.
It is significantly faster than dnf. I'm looking forward to it becoming the default.