Vanilla OS 2.0 Alpha Available Now (vanillaos.org)
from gonzoknowsdotcom1@monero.town to linux@lemmy.ml on 30 Aug 2023 01:09
https://monero.town/post/434826

#linux

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VerbTheNoun95@sopuli.xyz on 30 Aug 2023 02:06 next collapse

I played around with it in a VM earlier today. I liked the overall feel of it quite a bit, even as someone who prefers not to use gnome. But there are quite a few inconsistencies in using the alpha compared to what’s in the handbook, particularly for installing new packages. I wonder if that’s something that’s still being implemented in Orchid.

I liked it though, I’ll definitely keep following it.

aleph@lemm.ee on 30 Aug 2023 03:20 collapse

The latest developer preview build in an early alpha of 2.0. It is noticeably less functional than the latest stable release, which is still built on Ubuntu.

If you want to play around with their package manager and distrobox, I’d suggest trying out the latter.

entropy@not.alazy.dev on 30 Aug 2023 02:38 next collapse

Is there any info on what this distro is supposed to be? Browsed the site could not find any summary of what makes it different

jennraeross@lemmy.world on 30 Aug 2023 02:45 next collapse

It’s an immutable disto built around distrobox, I believe

aleph@lemm.ee on 30 Aug 2023 03:24 next collapse

This has some good info.

news.itsfoss.com/vanilla-os-beta/

The main change with 2.0 is the Debian Sid base, as opposed to Ubuntu.

Certainity45@lemmy.ml on 30 Aug 2023 15:41 collapse

Debian Sid? Why not Bookworm?

aleph@lemm.ee on 30 Aug 2023 16:44 collapse

The devs laid out their reasoning here:

vanillaos.org/…/vanilla-os-20-orchid---initial-wo…

Essentially, they want a non-opinionated rolling release and to stick with apt as a base package manager, which means that Sid is the obvious solution.

Certainity45@lemmy.ml on 31 Aug 2023 14:37 collapse

Thanks for the explanation. I just didn’t get the apt-part, since Bookworm uses apt too.

donuts@kbin.social on 30 Aug 2023 04:02 collapse

It's an immutable distro akin to Fedora Silverblue, which means it's theoretically extremely solid but you can't easily change the base system.

And while I haven't tried it myself, the thing that seems to set VanillaOS apart from something like Silverblue is that is built around the idea of containing various subsystems based on other distros (like an Ubuntu subsystem and an Arch subsystem), which should make it easy to install packages from a variety of distro (or even the AUR, for another example) on top of a very solid, static base system. Under the hood it uses a container management tool called Distrobox to achieve that, but it seems to be pretty nicely abstracted for user simplicity.

I daily drive Fedora Silverblue and I do something similar with distrobox for things that don't make sense to install as Flatpaks. In other words, on my system I have an immutable base system (with optional package layering, rollbacks, rebasing, etc.), then flatpaks or appimages for most simple applications (firefox, blender, krita, etc.), and finally distrobox to handle various dev environments and music production environment (which relies on wine and a lot of plugins).

VanillaOS is something like that, but out of the box, and aiming to be GUI-user friendly.

Jerrimu2@startrek.website on 30 Aug 2023 06:27 next collapse

I tried it for a while, not for normal use really. Everything is sandboxed and slow as fuck.

gonzoknowsdotcom1@monero.town on 30 Aug 2023 10:11 collapse

I’ve been daily driving for over a year and can say otherwise

Jerrimu2@startrek.website on 02 Sep 2023 04:33 collapse

I was using the Ubuntu based version, and the alternate package managers were slow on my low end system.

dontcarebear@lemmy.ml on 30 Aug 2023 22:48 collapse

Definitely going to check it out when they go beta. Sounds like a super stable daily driver (Gaming and light office work).

gonzoknowsdotcom1@monero.town on 30 Aug 2023 23:43 collapse

I use the stable version of vanillaOS and haven’t had any problems looking forward to 2.0