this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023

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Vanilla OS 22.10 Kinetic Showcase Video (www.youtube.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I know this trailer wasn't targeted at me, but it didn't tell me anything about the distro.

If I had a friend say "I've been holding off on switching to Linux, but you know, that vanilla os trailer really made me reconsider," I would think, that's great...but none of it is specific to vanilla, all of that has been widely available in every Linux distro for years.

[–] vector_zero 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm confused by this video (which is from nearly a year ago, btw). It looks like a gnome shell overview more than anything.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Also 22s of it's already brief 102s runtime was just Assassin's Creed gameplay lol.

[–] joneskind 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] joneskind 4 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the tips !

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

+1 for NixOS. I use it daily and it's really stable and fast

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Going to be my next distro I think

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Based

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Gnome looks great!

[+] mintycactus 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[+] mintycactus 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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!

[+] mintycactus 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Actually, I switched to SB just a few months ago, and I'm really really happy with it!

The main advantage for me for SB is that I can always rebase to any other official immutable spin (KDE, Sway, Budgie) or inofficial (from uBlue) variant.

In this way, I can quickly swap out everything except my "own" stuff (personal files, installed apps) super easily without reinstalling.

Theoretically, that should be possible on mutable distros too, but is really "dirty" and risky. On SB, it is done in a few minutes with one command and without any residues.

VanillaOS offers all those other benefits (unbreakability, easy updates, etc.) too, but I wanted to keep the option to change the OS later on (rebase), which VOS doesn't offer atm. Even though I love Gnome dearly, offering only that is too restrictive for me.

SB gives me all those features from VOS too, with Distrobox. I can even use apx if I want.

Also, I wanted to wait until VOS becomes more mature and wait until version 2.0. (Base changed to Debian, other release cycle, etc.).

VOS doesn't seem like a competitor to SB. More like a "future version" of what Mint could be, with the same philosophy, just executed differently with today's new technologies.

[–] Static_Rocket 2 points 10 months ago

That's... that's the point. Vanilla, as in no modifications.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Doesn't really tell me much about what the distro does differently from every other distro running gnome though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=aDvIJ_Hu90Y

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

thanks bot