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Website doesn't have an "About Vanilla OS" - New user experience

Open ticpu opened this issue 1 year ago • 0 comments

I recently came across Vanilla OS through a friend who described it as an "immutable Debian distro." Having had experience with an A-B system I made for another Debian project in the past, I was wondering if this could be an effort to implement something similar.

I started with the official web site, but it wasn't immediately evident what sets Vanilla OS apart from other Debian/Ubuntu distro until the part mentioning ABroot and OCI.

I read a bit about ABRoot in the documentation, but it is very vague about how it works technically. From my point of view, it reads like something that a snapshotting filesystem supplemented with an initramfs and bootloader hook could do, but nothing that would require a whole distro to achieve.

I came accross an other tool called VSO which seemed like a kind of timer/cron? Then APX which seems to be an important part of the project in how it handles multiple packages from different sources, a part that the main page doesn't clearly mention. I couldn't quickly understand how it'd be different from an extra packaging solution such as flatpak/snaps, for example.

I felt like it was important to share my experience as a new potential user that is taking a quick look before they decide to try a new OS.

The documentation is a bit unordered with introduction to subsystem appearing after the man pages and technical details. But the main issue remains that there's no definitive «About» page highlighting the unique selling points more prominently. Most of the main page explains what you can do with most other OS.

ticpu avatar Sep 18 '23 14:09 ticpu