Last year I wrote about the plans for phasing out of big endian support in the project by the end of 2022. This is now being changed. Instead, I will cease maintenance of the project as a whole beginning January 2023.
That means if the project is to continue, somebody else will have to take over. They will need to provide their own build infrastructure as well as everything else, as the public repository hosting will be shutting down as well.
The main reason for dropping of the project is that I have been working on a new distro, Chimera Linux. The new project is fully supported on the POWER architecture (and others) and is currently in heavy development (but expected to stabilize during 2022). Users are encouraged to migrate to it once that happens.
I have been thinking about this a lot and came to the conclusion that there is no reason to keep up maintenance of both projects. Chimera is explicitly designed to address various shortcomings of Void while retaining most, if not all of Void’s good aspects. That means Chimera should make for a good successor of the project.
Additionally, big endian support may be coming back in Chimera, at very least for 64-bit POWER. The viability of 32-bit PowerPC support will be evaluated as well. However, this will only happen after the project has stabilized its tier 1 architectures (ppc64le, x86_64 and aarch64). We will be introducing RISC-V 64-bit support as well for those interested.
In the end, the only loss is support for the glibc C library, as Chimera is a musl-only distribution. However, since musl is first-class in the project, the overall level of polish should be a lot better than in Void, and for most users there should be no need for concern, especially on the POWER architecture where there are no proprietary NVIDIA drivers and other things that would be of concern. Containers, flatpak and other solutions should prove effective enough in addressing glibc application compatibility.
If you are interested, feel free to stop by in any of our main channels. There are links on the Chimera website. I will probably not update this page any more, but will keep it running for the foreseeable future (the repositories will shut down next year, however).
