If you want a layman’sol opinion between Arch Linux ARM and Void Linux I much prefer Void Linux partly because systemd. I don’t hate systemd but it seems to add a layer of esoteric complexity that I have discovered I don’t need through my usage of Void Linux.

For example, I had been trying to set up a wifi USB adapter on Arch. I have installed and configured iwd for this. In Void, this would have been enough. But in Arch, there is a one-shot service that checks if network is available and other services that need network/internet can use this service as a depenendency. This is a nice feature but it turns out I then also have to configure this wifi interface in some systemd folder otherwise the one-shot service does not care a out the wifi adapter. Until I did this, some services would not start until the one-shot service timed out and failed and these kinds of problems are hard to google or ask help for because it is hard to tell in the first place what is going wrong.

There are other things like how systemd comes with its own implementations of ntpd, dns confguration and even some cron equivalent. It is very confusing. I guess it’s valuable knowledge if one uses systemd distros all the time though.