The developers of Vanilla OS have announced that they’re already working on version 2.0 and that in the future, the Linux distribution will be based on Debian Sid rather than Ubuntu.
Vanilla OS Changes Flavor to Debian Sid
Coming just weeks after Vanilla OS made its formal debut, the developers announced in an official blog post that they’re already hard at work on version 2.0, codenamed “Orchid.” The name was chosen because vanilla is derived from orchids.
The version number alone is a clue that major changes are afoot. The biggest one is a shift in the distribution that Vanilla OS is based on.
“After discussions and considerations, we decided to move away from Ubuntu and base our distribution on Debian Sid,” the blog post said.
Debian Sid is the “unstable” branch of the distribution where active development happens. It’s named after the neighborhood bully in “Toy Story” who tortured his toys and follows the practice of Debian codenaming its versions after characters from the movie.
The version numbering system itself is also a major change. The initial Vanilla OS release followed its parent Ubuntu’s convention of version numbers based on the year and month of release. The first one was based on the last Ubuntu stable release, 2022.10, or October 2022. The first Vanilla OS release followed at the beginning of 2023.
Why Did Vanilla OS Make This Major Change?
The main reason for changing the distribution that Vanilla OS is based on is that the developers considered Debian more, well, vanilla than Ubuntu. Ubuntu itself is based on Debian, so the developers seemed to want to go up the food chain.
Vanilla OS, with a name associated with sweetness, also wanted to avoid some of Ubuntu’s changes that have left a sour taste in some users’ mouths, namely Snap packages. These packages aim to bundle everything an app needs to run and allow upstream developers to better deploy Ubuntu apps, but some users have complained about slow startup times.
This is less of a stretch since Vanilla OS already favored Flatpak packages as well as .deb packages common to Debian-based distros. Flatpak has more support among the Linux community than Snap, which seems limited to Ubuntu and its developer, Canonical.
How Will Vanilla OS Fare With a New Distro?
Vanilla OS’s mission is to create an “immutable” Linux distro, where outside programs can’t change the main OS.
The young project is already ambitious in scope and represents a major change in how desktop Linux distributions work. Making such a major change already is bound to introduce new complications. It’s not clear how well this change will work in the future.
The Vanilla OS developers addressed concerns about stability by saying that the distribution supports a small number of core packages and that they will only test the base images.
Vanilla OS Makes Bold Changes to Desktop Linux
Despite being a new distro, Vanilla OS, despite its name, has already made some bold changes. Vanilla OS is a major rethink of the desktop Linux distro, which may seemed to have gone stale in recent years. Read on to learn more about this bold, fresh new approach to Linux.
