Doesn’t really tell me much about what the distro does differently from every other distro running gnome though
I played with this a bit in QEMU and I really enjoy the concept but am personally holding off on installing it to bare metal until the Debian rebase comes out. I haven’t used Ubuntu in quite a long time but an interim release sounds especially bad to base an immutable OS on.
Not true at all.
VanillaOS is an immutable distro made by the devs from Bottles.
It aims to be as user friendly and stable as possible, while giving advanced users the option to use their own package manager apx to install every software ever available for Linux.
Yes, you’re absolutely correct. The trailer is pretty generic and doesn’t tell you any of the (great) features and uniqueness of the distro.
BUT: the distro is catered towards newcomers. To normal users, who aren’t very techy.
To people who just want to play a game like Assassin’s Creed after coming home from work. Or want to watch YouTube. Or who want to edit a picture casually.
Who just use their PC like 99% of the general population.
Nobody, who isn’t a huge Linux nerd like us in our bubble, cares if a distro uses X11 or Wayland by default, or PipeWire, or dnf vs apt. Or even Snaps. Or whatever.
They just want something that is easy to use, is reliable and looks cool. And this distro gives them exactly that.
Mint is often considered as just a “less annoying Windows replacement” for many.
And as a very young person, I find Mint’s looks pretty old fashioned and boring.
VanillaOS looks way “younger” and “hipper”, I like it!
I see the trailer less as a “Look what our distro can and what it’s USPs are” and more like a “Look how awesome Linux is and what you can still do, you don’t need Windows for your software!” and I find that a good approach!
Looks like the built-in web browser is WebKit based (recognisable by its web inspector)
I never managed to make Netflix work properly on Linux’ webkit browsers. Widevine only seems to work with Chromium and Gecko based browsers.
According to omglinux, VanillaOS is a Ubuntu based Linux with an immutable file system (first time I ever hear of this).
To be honest, the only thing I care of this days is a good OS for my RaspberryPis.
Immutable OS’ are really cool and are probably going to be the future of Linux desktop computing as they are much more stable and reliable as well as removing a big maintenance burden on the distro devs by shipping most of the software via Flatpaks.
If you’re interested, there is NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, SUSE MicroOS, VanillaOS are the big names at the moment I also suggest this read for some general info about how they work https://tesk.page/2023/08/29/misconceptions-about-immutable-distributions.html
Gnome looks great!
