 Today I'm going to be taking a look at a rather new Linux distribution that I've never looked at before. What I'm going to take a look at on camera today will be my very first time using Vanilla OS. What is Vanilla OS? Well, I have been reading a little bit of their website because this is an interesting distribution. I did want to read a little bit about it before I got into it. Vanilla OS 22.10 was just released, 22.10 codenamed Kinetic. Yes, that's very Ubuntu-like in the version number and the codename is because Vanilla OS is based on Ubuntu. Now Vanilla OS is not just another Ubuntu spin. If I scroll down a little bit, what makes Vanilla OS not an ordinary Linux distribution is their Apex subsystem, their own automatic update system, and the AB route transactions. Now what are those? Well, Apex essentially is their package manager, APX. And what this is, it introduces a new paradigm in package management where instead of pulling down something using the apt package manager, what APX does is it installs everything inside a container. So it makes these packages that you install containerized packages and it can not only pull down the Ubuntu packages, but if you pass Apex certain flags, it can pull down Arch Linux packages, or you can also download Fedora packages as well using Apex. So this is really interesting. You can see you can pass Apex this dash dash AUR flag if you want an Arch package or dash dash DNF if you want a Fedora package. They also have this technology here, AB route, which allows you to perform changes to your system atomically, limiting the risk of breaking your system. So atomic packaging, what this is, is the ability to where if you're installing a package and it fails, you know, something breaks, nothing on your system will actually be changed unless the package installs and everything works correctly. The other big feature is their smart updates feature. They have something called VSO, which is the vanilla system operator. And it's a tool that periodically checks for an update and it downloads and installs the package in the background as long as your system is not under heavy usage. So I guess you can set some parameters such as CPU and RAM usage or battery life on a laptop, things like that. And as long as it meets those parameters, it will run these updates for you in the background. That actually is a really, really neat feature. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go ahead and download the ISO. I'm going to go ahead and run through a quick installation and first look, a truly first look of vanilla OS inside a virtual machine. So I've created a virtual machine here and I've got the boot screen up and I'm going to go ahead and choose try or install vanilla OS. And we boot into the installer, essentially full screen inside the GNOME desktop environment. I should have mentioned that before, vanilla OS will use the GNOME desktop environment. It's also going to use Wayland as the display server by default, which a lot of GNOME distributions are defaulting to Wayland these days. Some of the more stable ones like Ubuntu, LTS, things like that, they'll still default to Xorg, especially if it detects that you have an NVIDIA card, you know, obviously Wayland still doesn't really work with NVIDIA. So in that case, you can fall back to Xorg if you need to. So I'm going to go ahead and click install vanilla OS language. English US is selected for me. So let's see if I click this arrow here. Yeah, we just continue. So this is a very unique installer. I haven't really seen this kind of installer before. I'm not sure if it's their own custom installer or if they've kind of reworked ubiquity or calamaris or something like that. As far as the keyboard layout, English is fine. The variant English Australian was chosen for me. That's really not what I wanted. I want English US, of course. I could test the keyboard here and type some things, typing special characters, especially probably what you want to test out there. But I'm going to trust that all of that is OK. Now, date and time region, Africa is chosen. I need to choose America zone. I typically choose Chicago in these list of time zones, because that's the central time zone in the US. It tells me the current time so I can verify that I did choose the current or the correct time zone for me. And then I'm going to click next here, select a disk. I only have one disk inside this virtual machine and clicking on it does nothing. I'm assuming I have to click configure maybe not enough space. 25 gigs. I need a 50 gig virtual machine to actually run through the installation. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to blow away this VM, create a new VM with 50 gigs of space and come back. So it just took me a quick two minutes or so to destroy that first virtual machine, create a new one with I gave it 55 gigs of space on this virtual hard drive inside the VM. And now it's automatically selected the only drive in the system. And if I click configure, use entire disk. So this will do the automatic partitioning, which is what I'll do. But I could do manual partitioning if I wanted to, but I'm going to do the automatic partitioning. So I'll hit apply and then I'll click the next arrow here and confirm changes. So this is to verify that we're about to format that drive and right to the disk, anything on that disk, of course, will be erased, you know, if it already had something on it. But this is a brand new virtual machine. So I'm not overwriting anything. So I will confirm the changes and now we need to create our user. So my username, I'm going to say is DT. So DT is the user. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then confirm the strong and complicated password. And now click next. And then we have our summary. So language is good keyboard, time zone, disk and our user. So let's go ahead and install vanilla OS. Now this portion of most Linux installations takes between five and ten minutes. So I'm going to pause the recording and I will be back once the installation has completed and the installation has completed. That took maybe five minutes or so. I'm going to go ahead and click the reboot now button and restart. And remove the installation media. If I hit enter, the VM should automatically do that for me. And we are at our login screen. So let me go ahead and click on the DT user. Now, once again, let me move my head out of the way. It defaults to Wayland. So just GNOME is GNOME with Wayland. But if you wanted to, you could use Xorg and you probably would need to do that, especially if you are an Nvidia user. So I'm going to go ahead and log in with my strong and complicated password. And this is, of course, the GNOME desktop and GNOME 43. Let me go ahead and change the display here. Or we run through any kind of post installation stuff. I'm going to go ahead and make this 1920 by 1080 for the screen resolution. And now let's go ahead and run through this start screen here. So let's start color scheme. So by default, you got a light theme. Do you want dark mode by default? For me, I prefer dark themes. I always do dark themes. So that's nice that we go ahead and get a chance to set that right now. And you can see, as soon as I set that, we get a different wallpaper and we get a dark GTK theme. Choose one or more package managers to install. So there's a lot of package management stuff with vanilla OS. And it looks like by default, it will install flat pack and app image. But you could turn these off. I guess if you did not want to use them for me, I use both flat pack app image. I also use snaps. I've got no problem using any package format that's out there. So I'm going to click next and then applications. Do we want to install the core applications? Do we also want to install the Libre Office suite? I would typically install Libre Office on an actual computer in a VM. I'm not going to waste my time with it because I'm not going to use Libre Office in a VM, common utilities such as bottles or sound recorder. So bottles is like a wine wrapper to install Windows programs inside Linux. By the way, bottles was created by the guy that created vanilla OS. So he is actually a well known in the free and open source community for creating a lot of really neat applications, including bottles. But I'm not going to bother installing bottles again inside the VM. Next up, open VM tools. Choose whether to install open VM tools for the virtual machine. I'm not sure what open VM tools is probably something to do with GNOME boxes, which is a front end for QEMU, kind of like Vert Manager. GNOME boxes, they're kind of the same on the back end and just different GUIs to them. But I'll go ahead and install it. It's probably a small download restricted codecs. And that's needed for playing multimedia, especially for you standard desktop users. You really want multimedia codecs to make sure all of your audio files and video files and DVDs and Blu-rays and all that stuff play correctly. Then extra settings. The following are optional settings. Leave them as they are if you don't know what they do. So at port, that's a crash reporting system. So you want to send crash reports for me. Yeah, I don't mind sending crash reports to Linux distributions that ask for that information. I've got no problem with that and then authentication required. So I need to enter my sudo password to authenticate those changes. And why did I need to add a sudo password? Because obviously we told the system to install or remove a bunch of software, right? And to install and remove software, you have to give a sudo password. That says the subsystem is ready to go. We've got a little slide show here, but it says the changes are being applied. Please wait. And now that post installation stuff has completed. And you can see, once again, we need to reboot. So let me go ahead and reboot. All right, let me log back in. And now we're back in the desktop. You can see we are finalizing some stuff. So the device will be ready soon. Looks like it's installing several things from FlatHub. So it's installing a bunch of flat packs. And it finished installing those packages from FlatHub. That took three or four minutes. And you can see done. The device is ready to use. So let's go ahead and close and let's look around a little bit. So if I hit the super key, let's get into the menu system just to take a quick look at what is installed out of the box. Remember, I didn't choose LibreOffice. I didn't choose bottles and some of the extra tools. But mostly what we have here are the standard GNOME suite of applications. We really don't need to take a look at any of that. We got the GNOME terminal, GNOME music, GNOME maps, clocks, weather, cheese, which is our webcam program. But the vanilla OS centric stuff would include things like the vanilla OS control center and you can see it's loading the drivers. No drivers available. So this would look for extra proprietary drivers. This is really needed if you have, for example, an NVIDIA graphics card. You need the proprietary driver probably for your NVIDIA card. Right. Also, those of you installing this on a laptop probably need a proprietary Wi-Fi driver. So this tool should automatically go and install that for you. In my case, doing this in a VM, all the drivers are open source. There was nothing to go find. And then we have the update tab. And remember, on the website, it had the smart update feature that is ticked on by default update scheduling. It's going to do the smart update weekly, the latest update. It'll tell us when the last update check was run. In this case, it's never been run because we just installed this for the first time. And then you have subsystems. So this would be our containerized applications. There are no containerized apps installed on the machine. So let's close that out. The most interesting thing about vanilla OS, of course, will be software packaging containerization. So let's actually install some software. So I'm going to do a quick search for the software center. Of course, this is going to be GNOME software. And let's find a package that I want to install is H-Top installed out of the box because I'm going to need that. Anyway, it says no application found. So that could be a situation where it hasn't run a sync of the repositories because, of course, H-Top should be available through the app package manager. Also, you can install it on art for door. H-Top is available everywhere. So I'm not sure. Let me actually just go through one of the categories and see if any of this stuff has been populated yet. If I go to play here, the everything is kind of empty. It's just taking a long time to load. I may have to wait a minute or two to make sure that the yeah, everything syncs correctly. Now I do a search. Let me do a search for something I know is available as a flatback proprietary software discord. If I can spell it correctly, and of course, there is discord. If I click on it, loading application details. And you can see we've got the install button, the repository we're installing from, which is flat hub because this is a flat pack. And of course, if I installed that, it would probably appear in that settings manager where we have the containerized apps tab, because of course, flat packs are containerized apps, but I'm not going to install discord. It's kind of a big program. Let's see. If I did a search for H-Top, it's still not there. What's a small program I know is available as a flatback? Let's install Vim, because I don't think Vim is installed out of the box on a boon too. I don't know. It may be installed out of the box on vanilla OS, apparently not because we have the install button, and we can install it as a flat pack from flat hub. So let's install Vim. This should just take a couple of seconds to install Vim. Actually, I've been waiting about, I don't know, 30 seconds, 45 seconds. And it's still installing the flat hub servers. I don't know if they're normally kind of slow, or maybe they're just being overworked today. This is a long time for installing such a small program, though. And I've been waiting about two minutes now. You can see installing 100%, so it looks like it has finished. And now, yeah, let's hit the open button and see what happens here. Loading application details. I thought maybe it would actually just launch Vim, but there's something else is going on here. Yeah, it's not launching, but Vim, of course, is a terminal application. To launch it, you really would launch your terminal, and then let's try to run Vim. Vim, command not found. So even after installing it, yeah. But if I go through the menu system and search for Vim, Vim is there. I click on it. It does launch. Okay. So maybe the binary name being a flat pack, of course, the binary name is not going to be Vim, of course, it's going to be something different, right? Because with control T, bring up the terminal it will. Let me zoom in. Let's run a quick flat, flat pack list. And there's all the flat packs. And where is Vim? And that's the last line here. You can see the name is actually org.Vim.Vim. And the last Vim is capitalized. So the actual binary would be org.Vim.Capital Vim. You have to do flat pack, run, org.Vim.Vim. Yeah. That is one of the annoying things with flat pack. It's one of the things that bugs me more so than with snaps and app images is that, you know, I just want to be able to type Vim and go. And I don't know. I will probably have to uninstall Vim being a Vim user because I've been trying to use it all the time. I'm not typing all of that. I probably uninstall the flat pack and probably just install it as some other package format. But we're just going to leave that for now. Let me go ahead and hit Ctrl Alt T again to bring up a terminal. Let's go ahead and make this full screen once again and zoom in. Let's talk about this Apex package manager. So I'm not exactly sure how to use it. If I just use Apex without any arguments, I'm assuming it will give me help information and it does. That's nice. And there is Apex update, which is update the list of available package Apex upgrade. So you have to do a update and then an upgrade kind of like you do with the apt package manager, I'm assuming. Do I need pseudo privileges for this? I do Apex update. Will it complain? It says it's creating a container. Okay. This is installing basic packages. And you can see some of the container stuff it's doing. You can see it's doing something with Podman here. So it's really focused on a lot of these containerized technologies, vanilla OS. And you can see it finished. All packages are up to date. I wonder if I could do an Apex search. I'm not sure if search was one of the flags, but I do Apex search htop. Yeah. Okay. And you can see htop is available from the apt package manager. So if I did Apex install htop, would it just install the standard Debian package? Looks like it will. And now if I run htop, htop is not available. How do I run it? I've got to figure out how to run these things because I guess I could go into the GNOME menu and look for htop and launch it that way. But I mean, what is the name of the binary? By the way, memory usage. While we're here, CPU usage quite low. We're not doing anything to use the CPU though. So it should be low. Using about 1.2 gigs of the 6 gigs of RAM. That's not unusual. GNOME typically takes about 1 or 1.1 gigs, even when you're not doing anything. So this is pretty standard for GNOME. But still, where is htop? I guess I could do a sudo find on the root file system, the slash dash i name for the string htop. If the sudo password, I'm gonna find where this htop binary is. And it looks like I have found it. Let me zoom out a little bit and I'm gonna move my head because it looks like this line right here slash home slash dt dot local slash there slash containers slash vfs dir and then this hash number which I'm assuming is a specific hash for the package user share doc htop. So that's where the document is. The one above it is the same path that's up at the very end user bin htop and that would be the binary. So if I actually copied that and pasted that full path in the terminal and hit enter it says permission denied. What if I did a sudo bang bang. Yeah now I could run it. I have to have root permissions to run htop that way but that is where that binary lives. So there is really no way that they want you to actually run a program like that with sudo privileges when typically you would not need sudo privileges. So I'm assuming and this is one of these things sometimes you got to do some trial and error. It's probably in the documentation and one of the things I try to get especially newer delinix users to do is read man pages read help information remember apex without any information gives us essentially the help and I bet there is some kind of run command there it is. Okay so if I did apex run and then I run any of these containerized packages that I installed through apex would they run. So apex run htop. There we go. Alright so that is how you do that. I'm wondering apex run vim. It says vim not found in the path so I guess it only works for those that I installed actually with the apex command line interface installing vim through flat pack through the GUI I guess I'd still have to run that the traditional way. Well let me sudo flat pack remove vim. Of course vim is not there because it's org.vim.v capital V vim no installed rifts. What is going on here? This is a neat project but I'm really struggling here. Maybe it's not removed maybe it's uninstall. Maybe I forgot how to use flat pack. I think either one of those would have worked but it says no rifts found for org.vim.vim but there it is. Well obviously what I want to do is I want to do an apex install vim and get actually get vim from the app package manager and at least that way I could now do apex run vim and actually get vim. Let me close out the terminal and let me get back into the menu system. I'm going to go back to this vanilla OS control center and remember we had the drivers tab the updates tab and then the subsystem tab installed application so this is all our containerized applications well not really it's only listing those that were installed with the apex package manager. Flat pack I guess is something completely separate so anything you install as a flat pack isn't here but I have vim and htop both here and it actually launches them when you actually click on them so that's another way you could launch them but being mainly a keyboard centric kind of person I want to be able to through a run launcher either through just hitting super and you know here in you know which would work because it will launch them but especially thing using tools like d-menu and rophy you know I wouldn't I would have to prepend some of these applications to launch with things like apex run name of package and that's really really clunky especially once you get into scripting with some of these other configurable run launchers like d-menu now of course the reason they're doing all of this is because they're not installing any of those packages from the apt package manager as your traditional apt packages you know and slash user bin where most of your binaries live on most Linux systems right because they're doing everything as a container that's got its own separate kind of like a Nick store or a Geek store you know special directory where it puts all of these things as containers and they do that because theoretically you shouldn't be able to break your system because one app you really can't bring down the whole system and reading a little bit on their website some of their frequently asked questions I did notice that they eventually want to have a rollback feature kind of like Nix and GNU Geeks where you know if something breaks or you just want to roll back to a previous generation right you can just roll back to a previous working state for example if the system is broken and that's a neat feature and that's probably the way not just vanilla OS is going to go but probably most Linux distributions in the future one thing I should do let me open a terminal one more time because we haven't talked about what kind of kernel they are running they're just running 5.19 standard a generic kernel here right and if I do an apt list space dash dash installed or are there any standard binaries installed through the apt package manager says apt it's not found so I can't even do apt I wonder if I could do apex run apt list dash install what are the odds on that actually working yeah it won't so that does not work at all let me go ahead and check on the backgrounds that are installed let's see about their wallpaper pack because that's you know aesthetics do matter I know a lot of people you know I always wonder why I take a look at the wallpapers because again aesthetics do matter so looks like we've got of course two different wallpapers of the split views are depending on whether you're using dark mode or light mode because dark mode will use one wallpaper light mode will use the other I do like this photograph here that's pretty neat actually against a dark theme that is actually a fantastic wallpaper I may just leave that what is this here some interesting vegetation there we've got some water on some leaves we've got octopus or a squid or something there what is this side of a building that actually that very light wallpaper also works very nicely against a dark theme I think I'm just going to go with with this for now so that was just a very quick and cursory look at vanilla OS the very first time I've ever taken a look at it was right here on camera with you and I've got to say it is interesting I do appreciate what they're trying to do being an Ubuntu based distribution and being able to install everything as containerized packages having this immutability having this these this atomic system that theoretically you shouldn't be able to break because of a package doesn't install correctly or things break you it shouldn't affect the system and eventually again they'll probably have that rollback feature like you see and nicks and geeks and things like that and although I didn't try it on camera the fact that with apex by default it installs things from the Ubuntu repositories and containerizes those but I could have also specified with apex to pull down packages from the arch repository and containerize those or the fedora repositories and containerize those so that's a really neat aspect it really does make this a different kind of Linux distribution because so many distributions you know a lot of them all do the same thing there's variations on the same theme essentially but this really is truly unique now before I go I want to thank a few special people I want to thank the producers of this episode Brian Gabe James Matt maximum and Mitchell Paul West when you bought me Alex Homer dragon Chuck commander angry die okay George Lee Mars drum Nate Erion Alexander Paul peace arch and fedora polytech realities for less rep Robert Rowland Steven tools Devlin Willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now and these are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software subscribe to distro tube over on patreon these guys for such a new project this thing is actually quite impressive