• NN708@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    7 hours ago

    Hi everyone, Vanilla OS developer here. Thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts! Your interest and and feedback mean a lot to us.

    Vanilla OS has always prioritized simplicity, security and stability, which sometimes means that progress isn’t always immediately visible on the surface. In fact, we spent the last two months redesigning the root filesystem structure to address some compatibility issues with GNOME 49, while also ensuring seamless upgrades from older versions. We’re committed to refining and improving the system gradually, rather than reinventing everything.

    Regarding custom images, I still believe our Vib is one of the easiest ways to build your own OS, since all you need is a simple recipe file to build an OCI image. A fundamental improvement in latest version is our move to a new package repository synced with Debian snapshot archive, which ensures every custom image remains reproducible and usable over time, solving the earlier issue where custom images could become unable to install additional packages if they fell behind our official builds. We are also considering the idea of a web gallery to make discovering custom images easier, though we want to carefully establish audit mechanisms to help users avoid potential security risks when running third-party images (we’d love to hear your thoughts on this).

    We’re still deeply passionate about this project, but I have to admit we are in urgent need of more contributors. Upcoming priorities include ARM64 support, Android app integration, migrating system tools to the new Vanilla OS SDK, and improving documentation. If you’d like to see Vanilla OS grow and improve, we’d be thrilled to have you join us!

  • halet@programming.dev
    2·
    14 hours ago

    To me, it seemed as if Vanilla OS lost a decent amount of momentum in their transition to Vanilla OS 2. And I’d say they’ve yet to regain what has been lost. I don’t want to sound all gloom and doom, but is it sensible to be enthusiastic about this project’s future at this point? Like, are the developers still as invested, enthusiastic and motivated as they were in the beginning?

    • RalfWausE@feddit.orgOP
      4·
      13 hours ago

      Well, i am in no way affiliated with the developer team or the project in general and yes, there was some time when everything looked a bit… stalled… but at the moment it looks like they got back their motivation.

      is it sensible to be enthusiastic about this project’s future at this point?

      No, absolutely not. The chance that VanillaOS becomes a major distribution in the Linux world is minimal and there is the high probability that they just throw the towel at some point in the future. I mean, its like that time when somebody whose name i cannot remember started a Minix clone just for fun as a hobby project…

      • halet@programming.dev
        2·
        12 hours ago

        Thanks for the answer!

        I don’t know to what degree it’s sensible to regard the following as a metric. However, it does help in putting things into perspective. My belief is that Vanilla OS is directly competing with the whole uBlue ecosystem, even if one is Debian-based and the other Fedora-based. As such, I am curious to know how the custom image ecosystem of Vanilla OS is. Like, does something like this exist for Vanilla OS? (FWIW, there was another website that made browsing through these a better experience. But, sadly, I couldn’t find it.)

        • RalfWausE@feddit.orgOP
          3·
          12 hours ago

          As such, I am curious to know how the custom image ecosystem of Vanilla OS is. Like, does something like this exist for Vanilla OS? (FWIW, there was another website that made browsing through these a better experience. But, sadly, I couldn’t find it.)

          Well, there is Vib, and there are various custom images out there, but sadly i am not aware of any single website that list them. It’s all in all a much smaller project than uBlue and in things like that it shows.

    • RalfWausE@feddit.orgOP
      14·
      1 day ago

      In general it is -as mentioned by @h3ron@lemmy.zip- an immutable, Debian based distribution with GNOME. It uses a quiet interesting system called ABRoot for doing updates. I use it on one of my spare machines now since they did the switch from Ubuntu base to Debian and honestly i like it.

          • djsaskdja@reddthat.comEnglish
            1·
            1 day ago

            Ah thanks. Now I remember why I never used VanillaOS previously. I’ve been keeping my eye on bluefin-LTS though. Looks like a really interesting project. CentOS Stream based immutable distribution.

    • kittenroar@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      It’s an immutable distro that leverages containers to allow you to install packages from different distros. Further, it provides friendly tools and guis to make this easier than it would otherwise be

      • Trent@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        23 hours ago

        I might actually, I have someone dropping by a spare laptop they don’t want in a few weeks and I was going to toss xubuntu on it kind of by default, but maybe not.

        • eta@feddit.orgEnglish
          1·
          14 hours ago

          I’m running Aeon on my main laptop for I think two years now and it’s so nice to just have an updated system automatically after you reboot without doing anything. However Aeon is still in RC stage so there are occasional bugs mainly related to disk encryption since automated tests are not yet implemented. But there are many other options.