Vanilla OS 2.0 released, and other cool crap of the week

The Vanilla OS blog announced that a new stable version of the OS, the 2.0 version code-named Orchid, has been released. They describe the OS as "an immutable and atomic Linux operating system with user experience as the main focus."

The user can install and run software from Flathub and AppImages, and apparently snaps are coming. Additionally, the user can also use the apx software to setup containers of other Linux distros, then install software from there. And if you install a GUI app it'll create an icon in the menu. I went through the process of setting up openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, and Ubuntu, and installing and running neofetch on all of those. I'm not 100% sure of the use case of these, as it seems to add a bit of overhead. I'm guessing most users will stick with Flatpaks.

What I actually find the most interesting, from a business perspective, is they offer enterprise support. Anything that helps desktop Linux adoption in business and enterprise spaces is great in my book.

I've never used an immutable and atomic distribution of Linux, and I've generally moved away from GNOME as a desktop experience, but I'm taking it for a spin. Right now it's just in a VM, but if things go well, I may load it on one of the laptops and take it for a longer ride.

Website | Github

Below are a few screenshots.

Other Cool Crap of the Week

• New (to me) software: omgubuntu.co.uk posted about Gear Lever, an alternative to AppImageLauncher to integrate AppImages into your Linux system. I've used AppImageLauncher quite a bit in the past, but it hasn't been udpated in quite some time. I'm looking forward to giving it a try.
  Website | Flathub | Github
• Courts Close the Loophole Letting the Feds Search Your Phone at the Border
• OPNsense, a free and commercial firewall, and fork of pfSense, has announced that OPNsense 24.7, Thriving Tiger, was released. The post says this release "features a new dashboard, system trust MVC/API support, GRE and GIF MVC/API support, NAT 1-to-1 MVC/API support, WireGuard QR code generator, dynamic IPsec VTI tunnel support, experimental OpenVPN DCO support, FreeBSD 14.1, Python 3.11 plus much more."
• New (to me) Android app: MedTimer for Android is an open source medicine reminder app for Android. I started using it recently to track my post-surgery eye drops and love it.
  Github | F-Droid | IzzyOnDroid | Google Play
• A post on HackerNews shows SSOReady, an open source, someday commercial service that makes it easy to setup SAML single sign-on "without ever touching SAML yourself."
  Website | Github
• Univention Domain Join, the assistant for joining Ubuntu and Linux Mint computers into a Univention Corporate server domain, now supports Ubuntu 24.04.
  Github