As a long time Debian user, I agree with their choice. Their thought process is logical and sound.
Not sure I agree with their continued use of GNOME, though; seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE or to increasingly more obscure build-a-desktop stuff (ie, sway + waybar, or river, or bspwm, or w/e).
Some major distros already do KDE by default, and basically phone in their GNOME support by virtue of "GNOME claims it 'just works', so let it 'just work' and hang themselves on that claim".
But yeah, having a Debian-based atomic image distro seems to be very interesting. Would be more useful in enterprise than in the user desktop, but I guess they can do that in the future.
> seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE or to increasingly more obscure build-a-desktop stuff (ie, sway + waybar, or river, or bspwm, or w/e).
This is a bizzare take. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat and its spinoffs all default to GNOME.
Yeah. If anything, the exact opposite has happened, and KDE and GNOME work together on almost all new developments through FreeDesktop/XDG and they even have a shared conference now (LAS)
Aren't those just the older distributions who are already saddled with their defaults? What are the more recent distributions doing (steamos,popos,..etc)?
Dismissing things as "bizzar takes" is a good way to miss very clear signs.
GNOME is alright, I really like what they've done with it recently and for me it's almost perfect for daily use. I just wish it had a better file manager. If I were to pick a DE I would use KDE/XFCE or Cinnamon though.
Seriously, they managed to make a good user interaction flow, one that dismisses a lot of Windows idiosyncrasies. If they manage to port everything to GTK4, it will work out great.
The biggest issue lies in going against the norm, and most software is built against that norm. There are plenty of extensions to fix that however. But I do agree that they go overboard sometimes, like the inability to select the terminal that appears on nautilus' right click menu. That's were a lot of it breaks down for me, I should be able to select the tools I want, and not go through hacks to do something that's so simple to implement.
I tried it again recently, and I still find Gnome to be pretty horrible. It's very hard for me to use out of the box, and it very strongly resists being configured.
I get that some people love it -- and more power to them -- but I really don't understand why. I suspect that there's something fundamental about Gnome philosophy that I just don't understand.
I felt like you before, but ended up using it at work since it was what IT supported. After using it for a month, I switched all my personal machines over. For me, modern Gnome is the most usable, consistent, and smooth desktop experience I've used. And this is from someone who has used KDE, Windows, MacOS, and custom desktop environments with i3 and bspwm.
Modern gnome is a joke. For two years now, scrolling doesn't work in folders with many files. I can't find the issue in their bug tracker right now, but they're just like "well yeah it's not easy to fix". Like, how can you break something that fundamental in a way that makes it too hard to fix? And this isn't just some minor cosmetic issue, it literally is a showstopper if you frequently navigate large directories. Holy crap, but at least it looks pretty!
This long time Debian user does not understand why he would choose Gnome over the incredibly satisfying out of the box experience of KDE Plasma combined with its easy customizability. I suspect that I am not Gnome's target segment... What sort of user is Gnome targeting ?
Can I rearrange visual elements so my desktop is similar to how it has been in gnome 2, mate and xfce for the last 20 years? Can non-blessed apps get into the systray/notification-area/whatever?
Genuine questions, I've not tried Gnome since the early days of gnome 3 when they broke everything and more or less made out you were a luddite and unwanted loser if you weren't up for a massive change in workflow.
Back in my daily GNU/Linux days, I even wrote magazine articles about Gtkmm.
Nowadays, I rather not use a desktop that requires extensions for basic stuff (written in JavaScript!), no longer supports window shading, and hates files on the desktop.
FWIW, I really like Gnome, on my Laptop, on my desktop I currently use Plasma, because it has an ultra-wide monitor so the build-in tiling is really great (turn on wobbly windows and watch that jelly window snap into its grid position, it's glorious).
I currently use Gnome 3.22 and really like it, especially the one in Ubuntu. I also have a Debian 11 with Gnome at home on my laptop. Used to be all against it. But then I used MacOS X for a few years and then switched to another box with Linux and Gnome. Such a breath of fresh air compared to the Mac. Now I can switch virtual desktops with simple keybindings, without using the mouse. Most actions are a no brainer. I guess Gnome 4 is even better.
Vanilla's decision to base their distro on Debian is a good one. I am going to install Debian as well when this Ubuntu 18 LTS version reaches EOL.
I actually always kind of liked the Gnome look & feel, but I agree they dumb things down way too much. Even to the detriment of the user experience, where you have to go dive into dconf to work around the bugs they introduced.
And anyway, that was only until the new libadwaita crap, with yet another "flat look" they would look to force upon us.
Sounds like you've accidentally compared Wayland to X11 (which has nothing to do with your choice of DE; GNOME and KDE continue to support both for now, and both are looking to remove X11 support over the next two-three years (=major version cycle)); Wayland may be failing to accelerate compositing on your system due to missing driver stack features.
If you're on an Nvidia GPU and are trying Wayland, either use an up to date distro and stop using the Nvidia binary driver, or stop buying from Linux-hostile companies like Nvidia.
If we could force Nvidia to pull it's collective head of it's ass, we would; the entire Linux community has been trying for ~15 years, and it hasn't budged an inch.
I have two main issues with Gnome. The first is that I find it unintuitive and difficult to use. The second is that it's really hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to remove some of the pain points and add missing functionality.
I didn't know about Vanilla OS. So it's a distro that wants to provide a stable and coherent set of packages, with as few modifications as possible from upstream? And they opted for deb for the compatibility?
I see the appeal of being Ubuntu-based. They do the bulk of the work of releasing stabilized snapshots of Debian Sid. But indeed you need to revert a lot of stuff if you do this, and increasingly so.
> Ubuntu provides a modified version of the GNOME desktop, which does not match how GNOME envisions its desktop
As a KDE user on openSUSE that spend a lot of time on Ubuntu (before Gnome 3), I think this is the one thing that seems nice about Ubuntu customizations. This Unity-like version of Gnome seems appealing.
Basing on Debian seems like a good idea. Debian is great. Releasing stable snapshots of Debian Sid while handling security seems painful.
Good luck to them, I hope it works out well for them!
There are distros like Linux Mint that are desnapped. Wouldn't it be more sensible to base off of something like that?
I really like Debian. I love making minimal riced desktops with it. You can make a system that runs without Python :)) But Debian has two main issues:
First is the reality that everyone targets Ubuntu first and all online instructions are Ubuntu first. If you build off Ubuntu then you can be relatively sure the instructions work for you as well. The latest Ubuntu LTS package/library version set is one most projects will support
Second is that Debian doesn't have PPAs, nor really any equivalent mechanism. You end up having to resort to Appimages for end-user executables and who-knows-what for everything else. Prompt updates are then sorta out and it turns into a manual pain in the butt
Relying on AppImages/flatpack/etc for apps is a feature of immutable distros like VanillaOS, not a bug. The point is you never mess with the base system image. The goal is to leave the root as untouched as possible, with a transactional modification system when you absolutely must poke at the base system image, and install everything using your app packing format of choice.
Fedora Silverblue is another distro following the same 'immutable' principle based on OSTree. Silverblue wants the base system to be immutable, bundling in toolbox (similar to distrobox) to create a container with a regular mutable sysroot that can use the regular package managers. If you break the container you can tear it down and build a fresh one without nuking your host OS.
The goal is a reliable base system image that you can't break. It's something I've had happen many times with standard distros. Updating when too far behind is fairly likely to break something.
'Compatibility with Ubuntu' doesn't really matter as the system is already different enough even when based of Ubuntu for just googling 'issue Ubuntu' isn't going to be applicable. Do that stuff in a distrobox container.
> Second is that Debian doesn't have PPAs, nor really any equivalent mechanism.
You can, at your own risk, use ubuntu PPAs in debian. Also some projects publish their own debian repos - I have google chrome and terraform coming from custom repos at the moment, that's the real PPA equivalent.
I've been using debian for decades and I don't even know what an Appimage is ... but then I guess for commercial software I'm OK with snap. Intellij, skype, zoom, whatever can come from there. OSS comes from the distro repo.
PPAs is what launchpad calls apt repositories. It's possible to use launchpad to host apt repositories for Debian stable suites (testing/unstable would likely be more of a pain, but I haven't tried that) by specifying what suites to use when uploading. There are other SaaS hosts of apt repositories (e.g. packagecloud), or you can install one of the apt repository systems via apt on a VPS or similar, so if you have a deb built for Debian, there are options out there to distribute it.
You can build and publish repos for Debian (amongst others) on the OpenSUSE build system, though it's rather different from ppa and copr, for instance. Use osc(1) on Debian.
Also, the alternatives to PPAs are ... third party APT repositories. There is no technical difference to the users. PPA is just a hosting service from ubuntu.
Kudos on moving to Debian. And it'll be interesting to see what they settle on for vetting package updates to Debian Sid (Debian's constantly-updated track).
A long time ago, I ran Sid at home, but it was eating up time and presenting risk (e.g., at least once, it made a workstation unbootable). So I moved home and then startups to Debian Stable, which has much fewer surprises, mostly only security updates. Debian Backports (a supplementary package repo that provides newer versions of some packages) sometimes makes Debian Stable easier, in the rare care you really need a new version of a package (and not something you'd normally get from PyPI, NPM, Cargo, etc. or mirror&vet in your code repo).
I’m not sure if the classical distro model still has merit. There is just too much software now to package it all, properly, in time, by a handful of unpaid contributors, with badly documented ways. That just doesn’t scale, at all.
I’d wish we could finally settle on some kind of universal packaging mechanism, be it containers or flatpak or snaps, and get it over with. Too much time has been sunk in reinventing this wheel over and over again.
I like the balance this strikes. I think the future is moving towards some combination of super stable distro + containerised bleeding edge packages, where required (and isolated, where possible).
I'm still on a *buntu variant for now, but I would like to migrate to a set-up like this soon.
Their reasoning is pretty solid. Ubuntu is a terrible upstream for a distribution; it relies on Snap, which is [partially] proprietary. So if a distro is a derivate of Ubuntu, it can't have its own Snap repository, so it either uses the upstream repositories with no changes, or has to de-snap. If they're going to de-snap Ubuntu, you might just use Debian as a base.
I wonder if these guys are considering joining forces with the Mint guys, since many of their efforts seem to be in the same direction. I definitely hope this brings some extra hands into Debian, which seems to be much in need of it these recent times.
can i just point out the sublime, crystalline irony of something called “vanilla os” using one of the most spuriously patch-happy distros in existence as a base?
> Ubuntu provides a modified version of the GNOME desktop, which does not match how GNOME envisions its desktop
At one point I didn't understood what the deal is with default WM being Gnome.
I was happily using compton+i3 on Ubuntu Server customized for lightweight workstation. That's until Fortinet VPN Client or similar crap didn't refused to work w/o some Gnome libs.
Weirdly, installing Gnome from apt (or the snap garbage, don't remember) was not a clean solution and this software would not work on Ubuntu Server + Gnome while running with no issues on Ubuntu (Desktop) shipped with Gnome.
I'm happily Ubuntu-free now (went with Debian) and impatiently waiting for increasingly commercial Ubuntu to lose its popularity as it clearly makes some developers lazy.
Readit News
Not sure I agree with their continued use of GNOME, though; seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE or to increasingly more obscure build-a-desktop stuff (ie, sway + waybar, or river, or bspwm, or w/e).
Some major distros already do KDE by default, and basically phone in their GNOME support by virtue of "GNOME claims it 'just works', so let it 'just work' and hang themselves on that claim".
But yeah, having a Debian-based atomic image distro seems to be very interesting. Would be more useful in enterprise than in the user desktop, but I guess they can do that in the future.
This is a bizzare take. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat and its spinoffs all default to GNOME.
Dismissing things as "bizzar takes" is a good way to miss very clear signs.
Seriously, they managed to make a good user interaction flow, one that dismisses a lot of Windows idiosyncrasies. If they manage to port everything to GTK4, it will work out great.
The biggest issue lies in going against the norm, and most software is built against that norm. There are plenty of extensions to fix that however. But I do agree that they go overboard sometimes, like the inability to select the terminal that appears on nautilus' right click menu. That's were a lot of it breaks down for me, I should be able to select the tools I want, and not go through hacks to do something that's so simple to implement.
I get that some people love it -- and more power to them -- but I really don't understand why. I suspect that there's something fundamental about Gnome philosophy that I just don't understand.
I felt like you before, but ended up using it at work since it was what IT supported. After using it for a month, I switched all my personal machines over. For me, modern Gnome is the most usable, consistent, and smooth desktop experience I've used. And this is from someone who has used KDE, Windows, MacOS, and custom desktop environments with i3 and bspwm.
(found at least a Reddit post from three months ago that seems to be the same bug: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/1129jro/nautilus_scr...)
This long time Debian user does not understand why he would choose Gnome over the incredibly satisfying out of the box experience of KDE Plasma combined with its easy customizability. I suspect that I am not Gnome's target segment... What sort of user is Gnome targeting ?
Genuine questions, I've not tried Gnome since the early days of gnome 3 when they broke everything and more or less made out you were a luddite and unwanted loser if you weren't up for a massive change in workflow.
Nowadays, I rather not use a desktop that requires extensions for basic stuff (written in JavaScript!), no longer supports window shading, and hates files on the desktop.
My perception has been the opposite. The distros that I see people using are Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. I use NixOS and Gnome is the recommended DE.
Gnome has sane defaults and in my experience does actually "just work" on a surprisingly wide variety of modern hardware.
Vanilla's decision to base their distro on Debian is a good one. I am going to install Debian as well when this Ubuntu 18 LTS version reaches EOL.
It integrates with D-BUS, uses Gtk+, has several extension points, nice set of apps, plugins,
And anyway, that was only until the new libadwaita crap, with yet another "flat look" they would look to force upon us.
I'm just looking forward to Cosmic DE.
Sounds like you've accidentally compared Wayland to X11 (which has nothing to do with your choice of DE; GNOME and KDE continue to support both for now, and both are looking to remove X11 support over the next two-three years (=major version cycle)); Wayland may be failing to accelerate compositing on your system due to missing driver stack features.
If you're on an Nvidia GPU and are trying Wayland, either use an up to date distro and stop using the Nvidia binary driver, or stop buying from Linux-hostile companies like Nvidia.
If we could force Nvidia to pull it's collective head of it's ass, we would; the entire Linux community has been trying for ~15 years, and it hasn't budged an inch.
Moved from mac to Ubuntu and feel right at home in Gnome. Not sure what you're talking about here, but it seems quite opinionated.
"No, we don't care about your data. Ours is better."
Ha ha
https://vanillaos.org/faq
I see the appeal of being Ubuntu-based. They do the bulk of the work of releasing stabilized snapshots of Debian Sid. But indeed you need to revert a lot of stuff if you do this, and increasingly so.
> Ubuntu provides a modified version of the GNOME desktop, which does not match how GNOME envisions its desktop
As a KDE user on openSUSE that spend a lot of time on Ubuntu (before Gnome 3), I think this is the one thing that seems nice about Ubuntu customizations. This Unity-like version of Gnome seems appealing.
Basing on Debian seems like a good idea. Debian is great. Releasing stable snapshots of Debian Sid while handling security seems painful.
Good luck to them, I hope it works out well for them!
I really like Debian. I love making minimal riced desktops with it. You can make a system that runs without Python :)) But Debian has two main issues:
First is the reality that everyone targets Ubuntu first and all online instructions are Ubuntu first. If you build off Ubuntu then you can be relatively sure the instructions work for you as well. The latest Ubuntu LTS package/library version set is one most projects will support
Second is that Debian doesn't have PPAs, nor really any equivalent mechanism. You end up having to resort to Appimages for end-user executables and who-knows-what for everything else. Prompt updates are then sorta out and it turns into a manual pain in the butt
Fedora Silverblue is another distro following the same 'immutable' principle based on OSTree. Silverblue wants the base system to be immutable, bundling in toolbox (similar to distrobox) to create a container with a regular mutable sysroot that can use the regular package managers. If you break the container you can tear it down and build a fresh one without nuking your host OS.
The goal is a reliable base system image that you can't break. It's something I've had happen many times with standard distros. Updating when too far behind is fairly likely to break something.
'Compatibility with Ubuntu' doesn't really matter as the system is already different enough even when based of Ubuntu for just googling 'issue Ubuntu' isn't going to be applicable. Do that stuff in a distrobox container.
You can, at your own risk, use ubuntu PPAs in debian. Also some projects publish their own debian repos - I have google chrome and terraform coming from custom repos at the moment, that's the real PPA equivalent.
I've been using debian for decades and I don't even know what an Appimage is ... but then I guess for commercial software I'm OK with snap. Intellij, skype, zoom, whatever can come from there. OSS comes from the distro repo.
Imo this is changing. You're seeing it happen even in this thread.
Also, the alternatives to PPAs are ... third party APT repositories. There is no technical difference to the users. PPA is just a hosting service from ubuntu.
A long time ago, I ran Sid at home, but it was eating up time and presenting risk (e.g., at least once, it made a workstation unbootable). So I moved home and then startups to Debian Stable, which has much fewer surprises, mostly only security updates. Debian Backports (a supplementary package repo that provides newer versions of some packages) sometimes makes Debian Stable easier, in the rare care you really need a new version of a package (and not something you'd normally get from PyPI, NPM, Cargo, etc. or mirror&vet in your code repo).
I’d wish we could finally settle on some kind of universal packaging mechanism, be it containers or flatpak or snaps, and get it over with. Too much time has been sunk in reinventing this wheel over and over again.
I'm still on a *buntu variant for now, but I would like to migrate to a set-up like this soon.
I wonder if these guys are considering joining forces with the Mint guys, since many of their efforts seem to be in the same direction. I definitely hope this brings some extra hands into Debian, which seems to be much in need of it these recent times.
At one point I didn't understood what the deal is with default WM being Gnome.
I was happily using compton+i3 on Ubuntu Server customized for lightweight workstation. That's until Fortinet VPN Client or similar crap didn't refused to work w/o some Gnome libs.
Weirdly, installing Gnome from apt (or the snap garbage, don't remember) was not a clean solution and this software would not work on Ubuntu Server + Gnome while running with no issues on Ubuntu (Desktop) shipped with Gnome.
I'm happily Ubuntu-free now (went with Debian) and impatiently waiting for increasingly commercial Ubuntu to lose its popularity as it clearly makes some developers lazy.