As someone who switched from Slackware to Void several months ago, Void boots far faster. Also, though I haven't used Arch, Void really feels like a combination of a slimmed down Slackware + NetBSD (the author of Void is a NetBSD commiter IIRC). Of course, Gentoo portage was inspired by BSD ports, which I believe was an impetus for Arch's package manager.
I don't know what the story is for Arch, but I find that Void strives to make the system dead simple: it is even more minimalist than Slackware (it feels more like a BSD). It isn't just small, though: it has good defaults. There isn't a whole lot of documentation beyond the well-written man pages, and I believe this is in part because it isn't necessary.
Like Arch, though, it is a rolling release system: an update may break your system, and package indices quickly become stale as old packages are deleted from the server. You can easily fix this by updating the index.
Installed on an old Thinkpad X61s from the xfce4 live .iso (< 600Mb) dd'ed to a usb stick. Boots into an xfce live graphical session with network-manager recognising the Atheros wifi card. Minimal install - xfce 4.12 plus Web browser and image viewer (1.5Gb on hard drive).
Ran the installer script from a terminal in the live session - result is an ncurses dialogue that walks you through the steps. Disk already partitioned and skipped the network set-up stage and selected install from local. Rebooted into (graphical, xfce4) installed system in a few minutes. Network manager up and running, needed to log-in to local wifi again.
Probably because I skipped the network stage in the installer, I needed to set a repository for updates.
It looks like you've already figured out some things like sound, wifi, and xbps, but: I found the following guide helpful in complementing the man pages:
I worked out that root defaults to /bin/sh before reading the voidtips page above. Also worth mentioning here that Firefox-esr (52) is installed by default from the xfce4 live iso. Firefox release (59) is also available as is Chromium (65). Some font-puggling is needed (fontconfig stuff) to get sub-pixel rendering.
In all, quite nice. I'll see how long it takes me to break this.
I don't know what the story is for Arch, but I find that Void strives to make the system dead simple: it is even more minimalist than Slackware (it feels more like a BSD). It isn't just small, though: it has good defaults. There isn't a whole lot of documentation beyond the well-written man pages, and I believe this is in part because it isn't necessary.
Like Arch, though, it is a rolling release system: an update may break your system, and package indices quickly become stale as old packages are deleted from the server. You can easily fix this by updating the index.