 Let's talk about the space of like wild KDE distributions, we have like Fedora Kinoide, which is immutable, and has a version which always uses KDE Latest, which means that it can kind of replace KDE Neon if you want to test the very latest of KDE. Then there is also Nitrox OS, which does use KDE Plasma and is kind of immutable lately, and focuses a lot on app images for some reason, and customizes KDE Plasma in such a way that is basically unrecognizable, but we'll get to that. And finally there is Vanilla OS, except the reason, because Vanilla does not use KDE, but yet, and they have a big announcement talking about Vanilla OS 2.0, so we'll get to that as well. So today we're going to talk about two of these 3D stores, which is Nitrox and Vanilla, because Nitrox is kind of ditching KDE Plasma in my opinion, and Vanilla OS is ditching Ubuntu. So let's get started with Nitrox OS. I have to do a quick recap for those who aren't experts about the Maui situation, because it's just so confusing. So there is MauiKit, which is made by the Maui team, and is a kit to make applications, and this is part of KDE. Then there are a lot of applications done with MauiKit, and these are also part of KDE, and used in many KDE projects, and then there is MauiShall, which is not part of KDE, and is a shell, so a desktop, made with MauiKit. And all these three things together make the Maui desktop environment, we could call it, so the desktop and applications, which is halfway between being inside and outside of KDE, somehow. Nitrox is a distribution that uses all Maui apps, so it's very close to the Maui team, and customizes KDE Plasma in such a way that it's very close to MauiShall in its design. However, personally I thought like months ago that they were going to switch to MauiShall, and they kind of did, except now they have two official flavors, one using Plasma, a very customized Plasma, and one using MauiShall. So in the long run, in my personal opinion, I think they will ditch the Plasma version in favor of the MauiShall one, because they're using Maui everything. Is MauiShall any good? We can try that out, actually, because we have the MauiShall flavor of Nitrox OS, so there's actually lots of great concepts in this desktop. Firstly, you have this fragmented top panel, which is not something KDE can do, and it very much has a quick settings vibe, if you know what I mean. So you have these floating dialogues with the most important settings, and if you click on some of them, they will expand to give more information, and I think it's a really great design. You can toggle a lot of things, and most importantly, you can also, with your finger or your mouse, drag and drop from the top to actually expose all these floating dialogues. So it's very accessible even if you're using a tablet, as an example, or even a phone, apparently. Personally, I do like the design a lot, even though it doesn't quite feel ready for everyday usage. It's missing a lot of icons, apparently, and you know, these kind of little things that you should fix before the final release, but that makes sense. In the system tray, you have this quick toggle for the compact mode or tablet mode, which makes everything more compact and also maximizes every window. So you get, you get basically like a tablet. And that's also quite useful, especially if you have, like I do, a computer that rotates with a 360 degrees inch, so you might want to switch between normal mode and tablet mode occasionally. That's not something KDE Plasma exposes to the user that easily. You have to go into settings. The multitasking view, in my opinion, needs some work. There's no animation when you actually open it. And there's just a list, which doesn't, in my personal opinion, look that good. However, you can just swipe away applications, even with your mouse for some reason. So you do have that nice feature. You don't have the virtual desktops, and that's a pretty big deal. But that makes sense considering it's the very early stages of the project. The plancher, I like a lot. Actually, you have the most recently used applications in the top. And then you have all categories of applications divided into folders. And you can just open the various folders and drag and drop applications around. However, again, it's not pretty yet because the drag and dropping stuff is a bit buggy. And being able to add applications to the bottom doc is sometimes not as easy as should be. All apps are my way ups, which in my opinion, look really good. But it's really up to you whether they can actually be useful for you in your daily use cases. In my opinion, for me specifically, they cannot quite replace any other application, but they do have the very big advantage of working on Android. So I've got actually my little Android tablet with all the Maui apps inside of it, which is super nice. Oh, and the doc at the bottom is intelligent hide, which means that it only hides when you drag and drop a window above it. And that is also a feature that you cannot get in KD Plasma out of the box. So that's a nice one. Overall, I like the design. It's really not customizable. And it's very early stages of the project. But it's interesting. I would prefer to see those efforts in KD Plasma rather, rather than, you know, creating a whole new desktop. But it's Maui, you do you. Okay, so now that we've covered Maui, let's switch talking about vanilla OS. So they announced the version 2.0. What's new? Well, they are ditching Ubuntu. So why are they doing this? So firstly, you have that Ubuntu has a very opinionated workflow, even in like GNOME. What this means for vanilla OS, which wants everything to be vanilla, is that they have to take the opinionated GNOME from Canonical, and then take off the opinionated from it, which which turned out to be quite difficult. So they say, you know what, we're just going to take the most vanilla thing and we're going to go to Debian. And we're going to take the GNOME version from Debian. So yes, they are moving to Debian. Secondly, yes, it's because of snaps. Yeah, you kind of guessed it. So Canonical is also very opinionated in how you should install your applications. And they are pushing snaps a lot. As an example, they just took off flat packs out of the box in all flavors of Ubuntu, which is the main competitor to snaps flat packs. So yeah, not a move that makes me very happy to be fully honest. Another advantage of using Debian is that they now can decide when to publish new updates instead of having to follow, you know, Ubuntu schedule, they can just release whenever they have something ready. But there's more changes coming to version 2.0. As an example, the installer now has two views, which is express and advanced. So use express if you want to get done with it quickly and use advanced if you want to tinker a bit with the system, obviously. Additionally, vanilla OS 2 will come with GNOME 44 and the kernel 6 or 6 plus. And most importantly, we should soon see a KDE version of vanilla. So how this works is that currently they are working on taking the welcome application from KDE and adding all the settings and inputs that should be in the first boot process for vanilla. As an example, I think you get to be completely forgot, but editor put something in whilst I'm speaking. And yes, there's still work to do, but we are getting closer and closer to a KDE release of my favorite immutable distro. So can't wait, can't wait. And another thing, if you're interested, feel free to tell me whether I should like do an interview with the developers or not, because every time I do a vanilla video, I always talk to them first and often we do like jokes on Twitter and such. So I guess I could just interview them. So I think these are lovely projects that are going on and either getting closer to KDE or moving away from KDE, apparently. Neatrux. Nonetheless, if you want to help me out, do these videos and contribute to KDE as much as I'm able to right now, this channel, actually maintaining this channel is kind of expensive. So any donation would be very appreciated. These things that I'm doing are often not for free, but I've seen nonetheless try to make my content available always to everyone. So I'm trying my best and any help would be appreciated. Of course, you don't have to, it's still free for everybody. Thanks for following along and see you tomorrow with a new video or in a couple of days or something.