This is pretty sick. Not just flatpaks but easily install any application, using apt or dnf package managers, or deb or rpm files, in a container with a simple syntax. Wow. Wrap a GUI around it and this may be a winning formula for an easy and stable Linux desktop.
They are already doing it. Their forked gnome software takes deb packages too.
That’s not mentioned in the text.
Are you speaking of distrobox/toolbox? Which is available on any linux system.
That’s not mentioned in this specific blog post, but that’s always been one of Vanilla OS’s defining features, it’s “apx” package manager to install those various types of packages
It’s even using Distrobox actually, but the point is to make it simpler to install packages for those contrainers, with the user not worrying as much about managing the individual containers, and not having to memorize the specific commands for each individual distro’s package manager
Basically, like the rest of Vanilla OS, the point isn’t that you can’t do this stuff elsewhere, it’s that it’s trying to make it easier to do it
“ABRoot is utility which provides full immutability and atomicity to a Linux system, by transacting between two root filesystems. Updates are performed using OCI images, to ensure that the system is always in a consistent state. It also allows for local atomic changes thanks to the integrated ABRoot package manager, which generates local OCI images with the user’s changes, and then applies them on top of the system’s default image.”
(From ABRoot’s page on Github)
This sounds a lot like what Fedora is trying to achieve with their ostree native containers.
Are there any technical differences between the two? Besides, of course, relying on tools with different names etc*. FWIW, it doesn’t seem as if ABRoot (v2) allows one to pin multiple deployments, while this can be done relatively easily through the
sudo ostree admin pin [-u] <index>command on Fedora Atomic.Ahh…I get it…I saw the title and thought it was about IBM’s OS/2 in an “out of the box,” uncustomized state, hence “Vanilla OS 2” code-named Orchid…oh, never mind already.
i do not see the hype for immutable distros, they seem to be for an incredibly niche sub-section of the linux desktop which is already incredibly niche (i’ll probably be answering my own question). good for the devs for trying new things i guess but these seem like hell to use if you are a tinkerer, gnome is whack and won’t convince any new users to use linux. it seems like an operating system i’d install for my tech illiterate parents so i won’t have to troubleshoot anything if it had a desktop like cinnamon or kde because they would have some familliarity with a windows like ui.
Why would “people who don’t want to have to troubleshoot anything” be a niche? I love it exactly because it’s mostly the same as what I used to have, except that I don’t have to worry about updates breaking as much.
I’ve been really interested in this project for a while now and even more excited when they announced 2.0. I can’t wait to try out the beta once it’s released
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Feels like pointless recreating of everything that is allready available for years.
This seems to be either blatantly false or simply uninformed.
Sure, for years, there have been many different attempts to explore ‘immutable’(/‘atomic’) distros. And while some concepts have become mainstays, like; atomic updates, some degree of immutability during runtime and to a lesser degree; reproducibility, declarative system management and reliance on (OCI) images. There remains a lot to explore still and differentiation in implementation (however minute) is important as it’s not always clear what will and will not stick eventually.
As to your claim of Vanilla OS “pointlessly recreating what is already available for years”, the only atomic distros that have been usable for years are Fedora Atomic, Guix System and NixOS. Both Guix System and NixOS are radically different from all the others and Fedora Atomic has only relatively[1] recently[2] started to do the things that actually resemble what Vanilla OS 2 Orchid envisions for their system.
