Here’s an explanation: https://lemmy.ml/post/54981116/28830246

Sorry for the inconvenience. I’d like to explain a bit:

Vanilla OS is based on the rolling-release Debian sid, which lets us bring newer features and better hardware support. But that also means some libraries will inevitably be deprecated over time. That’s why we always recommend Flatpak as the first option for installing apps.

Regarding the Augest update: that was a major release (Vanilla OS 3 Reunion), and we did everything we could to minimize the migration impact for existing users. The subsystem change is one of the breaking changes we couldn’t avoid. The underlying Distrobox v1 is no longer receiving updates and had already been causing quite a few compatibility issues, so we had to move to Distrobox v2. Unfortunately, v2 introduces breaking changes in exporting bins and apps, which meant the containers had to be recreated. We fully understand the impact this has on our users, but this migration is necessary to ensure stability over the next few years.

We really appreciate your feedback, and we remain committed to improving reliability in the future, in line with our original vision of providing an obstruction-free Linux experience for people around the world.

I’m one of the developers here. It’s quite common for distros that use non-LTS kernels to ship kernel versions that are already EOL. Fedora, for example, currently ships kernel 7.2 as well.

As for the delay, you can see from @eleijeep@piefed.social’s comment that we need to ensure the OS is stable enough before release. It took us a week to resolve the compatibility issue between kernel 7.2 and our ABRoot, which was preventing the system from upgrading. We shipped the earlier snapshot rather than 7.2.15 just because it’s better tested.

If you read the first few lines of the blog post, you’ll see that Vanilla OS 2 can be upgraded to Vanilla OS 3 seamlessly. The project has matured significantly over the past two years, and we’re actively working to ensure existing users have a smooth experience, for example, with the new update mode in First Setup.

As for Mirko, his work on Sinty OS doesn’t mean Vanilla OS is abandoned. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be releasing Vanilla OS 3. I’d kindly ask that you base your criticism on facts, not on presumptions about what we may or may not be doing.

If you read the first few lines of the blog post, you’ll see that Vanilla OS 2 can be upgraded to Vanilla OS 3 seamlessly. The project has matured significantly over the past two years, and we’re actively working to ensure existing users have a smooth experience, for example, with the new update mode in First Setup.

As for Mirko, his work on Sinty OS doesn’t mean Vanilla OS is abandoned. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be releasing Vanilla OS 3. I’d kindly ask that you base your criticism on facts, not on presumptions about what we may or may not be doing.

Hi everyone, Vanilla OS developer here. Thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts! Your interest and and feedback mean a lot to us.

Vanilla OS has always prioritized simplicity, security and stability, which sometimes means that progress isn’t always immediately visible on the surface. In fact, we spent the last two months redesigning the root filesystem structure to address some compatibility issues with GNOME 49, while also ensuring seamless upgrades from older versions. We’re committed to refining and improving the system gradually, rather than reinventing everything.

Regarding custom images, I still believe our Vib is one of the easiest ways to build your own OS, since all you need is a simple recipe file to build an OCI image. A fundamental improvement in latest version is our move to a new package repository synced with Debian snapshot archive, which ensures every custom image remains reproducible and usable over time, solving the earlier issue where custom images could become unable to install additional packages if they fell behind our official builds. We are also considering the idea of a web gallery to make discovering custom images easier, though we want to carefully establish audit mechanisms to help users avoid potential security risks when running third-party images (we’d love to hear your thoughts on this).

We’re still deeply passionate about this project, but I have to admit we are in urgent need of more contributors. Upcoming priorities include ARM64 support, Android app integration, migrating system tools to the new Vanilla OS SDK, and improving documentation. If you’d like to see Vanilla OS grow and improve, we’d be thrilled to have you join us!