Vanilla OS Is Not Your Ordinary Linux Distro

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 vanillaos 22.10 was just released 22.10 code name kinetic yes that's very Ubuntu like in the version number and the code name 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 a b root 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 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 A B root which allows you to perform changes to your system atomically limiting the risk of breaking your system so Atomic packaging what this is is it's 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 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 Weyland as the display server by default which a lot of gnome distributions are are defaulting to Weyland these days some of the more stable wins like Ubuntu LTS things like that they'll still default to uh xorg especially if it detects that you have an Nvidia card you know obviously Waylon 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 a reworked ubiquity or calamaris or something like that as far as the keyboard layout English is fine the variant and 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 okay now date and time region Africa is chosen I need to choose America Zone I typically choose Chicago in these lists 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 hey we're about to format that drive and write to the disk anything on that disk of horse will be erased you know if it already had something on it but this is a brand new virtual machine so I'm not overriding anything so I will confirm the changes and now we need to create our user so my username I'm gonna 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 sum 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 5 and 10 minutes so I'm gonna pause the recording and I will be back once the installation has completed and the installation has completed that took about maybe five minutes or so I'm gonna 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 Weyland so just ganome is gnome with Weyland but if you wanted to you could use xor gonna 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 19. 20 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 amp 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 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 LibreOffice Suite I would typically install LibreOffice on actual computer in a VM I'm not going to waste my time with it because I'm not going to use LibreOffice 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's actually uh 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 you can own boxes they're 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 that 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 it says the subsystems ready to go we get a little slideshow 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 genome desktop you can see we are finalizing some stuff does the device will be ready soon looks like it's installing several things from Flat Hub so it's installing a bunch of flat packs and it finished installing those packages from Flat Hub that took three or four minutes and you can say 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 uh 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 you know 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 a 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 subsystem 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 be a situation where it hasn't run a sink of the repositories because of course h-top should be available through the APT package manager also you can install it on Arch and for door h-stop 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 uh yeah everything syncs correctly now if I do a search let me do a search for something I know is available as a flat pack 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 flat pack let's install Vim because I don't think VM is installed out of the box on Ubuntu 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't install it as a flat pack from Flat Hub so let's install them this should just take a couple of seconds to install film actually I've been waiting about I don't know 30 seconds 45 seconds and it's still installing so 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 a small program though and I've been waiting about two minutes now you can see installing a hundred percent so it looks like it has finished and now yeah hit the open button and see what happens here loading application details I thought maybe it would actually just launch Vim but then something else is going on here yeah it's not launching but you know of course there's 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 here if I click on it it does launch okay so maybe uh the binary name being a flat pack of course the binary name is not going to be film of course it's going to be something different right because with Control Alt T bring up the terminal it will let me zoom in let's run a quick Fleck flat back we'll dust and there's all the flat packs and where is vim um it's the last line here you can see the name is actually org.film dot vim and the last of them is capitalized so the actual binary would be org dot Vim dot capital V item you have to do flat pack run or dot film.com yeah that is one of the annoying things with flat pack it's one of the things that bugs me uh more so than with snaps and app Images is that you know I just want to be able to type them and go and I don't know uh I will probably have to uninstall them being a Vim user because I've been trying to use it all the time I'm not typing all of that I probably uninstalled the flat pack and probably just installed 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 uh do I need sudo privileges for this if I do uh Apex update will it come complain no 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 a Apex search I'm not sure if search was one of the flags but I do Apex search h-top yep okay and you can see h-top is available from the APT package manager so if I get Apex install h-top would it just install the standard Debian package looks like it will and now if I run h-top h-top 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 h-stop and launch it that way but I mean what is the name of the the binary uh 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 six gigs of RAM um that's not unusual but Norm typically takes about 1 or 1.1 gigs uh even when you're not doing anything so this is pretty standard for Gnome but still where is h-top I guess I could do a sudo find on the root file system the slash Dash I name for the string h-stop give the suit hoop password I'm gonna find where this h-top binary is and it looks like I have found it let me zoom out a little bit and I'm going to 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 h-stop so that's where the document is uh the one above it is the same path except at the very end user bin h-top 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'd have to have root permissions to run h-top that way but that is where that binary lives so there is really no way um that they want you to actually run a program like that with pseudo 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 to Linux 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 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 h-top there we go all right so that is how you do that I'm I'm wondering Apex run them uh it says uh film not found in the path so I I guess it only works for those that I installed actually with the Apex command line interface uh 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 them is not there because it's org.vm dot V capital D them no installed riffs foreign 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 uh neat I I think either one of those would have worked but it says no Rifts found for org dot film dot film but there it is well obviously what I want to do is I want to do an apex install them and get actually get them from the app to package manager and at least that way I could now do Apex run vim and actually get them now 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 have the drivers tab the updates Tab and then the sub system 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 h-top 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 uh you know here in you know which would work because it will launch them but especially thing using tools like d menu and rophie you know I I wouldn't I would have to pre-pend 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 NYX store or geek store you know a 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 NYX and a 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 gonna 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 uh 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 it says apt it's not found so I can't even do uh apt I wonder if I could do Apex run apt list Dash installed what are the odds on that actually working 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 per pack because that's you know Aesthetics do matter I know a lot of people you know always wonder why I take a look at the wallpapers because again Aesthetics do matter so looks like uh 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 yeah that's pretty neat actually against a dark theme that is actually a fantastic wallpaper I may just leave that what is this here and some interesting vegetation there we got some water on some leaves we've got uh 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 gonna 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 uh what's 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 in Ubuntu based distribution and being able to install everything as containerized packages having this immutability having this these this Atomic system 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 roll back feature like you see in 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 that's a really neat aspect it really does make 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 Mitchell Paul West one you bought homie Alex armor Dragon Chuck Commander angry dialogue George Lee Mars drum Nader Alexander Paul Peace Arch and Fedor Polytech realities for Less red private Roland 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 but you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software subscribe to distro tube over on patreon peace guys for such a new project this thing is actually quite impressive

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 116,132

Keywords: vanilla os, open source, linux tutorial, best linux os, vanilla os review, linux, gnu linux, ubuntu, linux operating system, linux commands, linux vs windows, linux for beginners, terminal commands, switch to linux, learn linux, linux software, package manager, ubuntu based distros, gnome desktop, desktop environment, linux container, flatpak, appimage, apt package manager, distrotube

Id: yajUbh0H6-s

Length: 27min 3sec (1623 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 04 2023