Might seem a bit boring at first glance but it’s being developed by the guy who makes bottles & has a few nice little additions that are out of the ordinary for buntu based distros.
Some of the more interesting bits:
choose your package format at setup (flakpak, snap/dev/app image)
on demand immutability
apx package manager (allows you to install from the AUR)
Thanks to an integrated driver manager, your GPU will no longer be a problem, be it AMD®, Intel® or NVIDIA®, if something is missing, just open the driver manager and follow the suggestions, it’s that simple.
Seems too good to be true or painful to maintain all possible hardware if it is one guy running the show.
Edit: but then it is gnome after all, it just works
The immutability thing, seems similar to what’s on the steam deck out of the box. First time I heard of it was fedora silverblue.
Been following their progress on their Discord for a bit and it’s looking like it’ll have a stable release in late December or early January depending how the final tests go. The project has attracted quite a modest amount of attention since it’s announcement. It’s not a great (or accurate) metric to go by, but their Discord has around ~400 members and their GitHub star counts have also gone up quite a bit as well since they started.
I don’t know if I personally need an immutable type setup for my workflow, but nonetheless I do find the concept interesting even if it may not be for me. WIll have to test drive it at some point in the future to really find that out. Some things I do know now that may not be quite as clear yet is what Vanilla OS will actually be.
It’ll use Wayland, pipewire, btrfs by default, as well as the latest 6.0 kernel series (outside of any issues), so it’s something akin to Fedora’s setup. Their package manager apx has added flags for dnf and the AUR so you can install packages from those sources as well, albeit they will be installed via a container with the help of distrobox. To install things on the actual system vs a container you’ll have to do a switch between turning immutability ON or OFF, with either a terminal cmd or a GUI prompt.
In terms of repos, it looks like they’ll be doing what EndeavourOS does with their repos, aka use Arch repos with one extra EndeavourOS repo. Vanilla OS will use the Ubuntu repos for the apt packages, but also include a small Vanilla repo of their own for their tooling software. I think there’s still a current debate on how to package Firefox, since on Ubuntu it’s a snap, so they may ship it via Flatpak, use their own PPA or maybe just ship Gnome Web as the default browser. They do aim to keep things small and easy maintenance, much like EndeavourOS philosophy which helps to avoid potential burnout.