Vanilla OS 3 Comes in Hot, Packing ARM64 Support After a Long Wait

My history with Vanilla OS goes back to 2022, when I covered its debut stable release, just a month after I landed this gig at It's FOSS (yapping about open source and Linux).

Since then, my focus has moved to other distros and governance-focused developments, though I did watch it swap its Ubuntu base for a Debian Sid one and, from a distance, then go through an Orchid-themed overhaul in 2024.

I never got around to actually running it later on (or even reviewing it), but that's how things go, I guess.

If you haven't come across it before, Vanilla OS is an immutable, atomic distro built around ABRoot, with Apx facilitating package installation inside containers instead of touching the base system directly.

What's new in Reunion?

Well, if you are someone who is running an ARM64-based setup, be it a single-board computer, laptop, or a fully-fledged workstation that boots UEFI, then you will be glad to know that Vanilla OS now has proper support for the ARM64 platform.

Every package now builds for both ARM64 and x86_64, and the team isn't treating ARM64 as the lesser platform; functionality-wise, it's supposed to match the other one for one.

And, with the exception of NVIDIA builds, most images of Vanilla OS are now bit-for-bit reproducible. That means you can rebuild an image yourself and check it matches what the project ships instead of just blindly trusting what their build infrastructure pumped out.

The desktop-facing upgrades

Powering the release is Linux kernel 7.1.3, which is accompanied by GNOME 50. While we have already talked a fair bit about this desktop environment release across other distro releases, here's a refresher for you.

GDM now runs Wayland only, following through on the X11 removal GNOME backed away earlier. Fractional scaling also graduates out of its experimental flag this time around.

You get a bunch of new default apps too. Ptyxis takes over from Black Box, and its container support is the reason why you should keep an eye out for it.

Papers steps in for Evince with a noticeably more modern PDF reading experience, and Resources replaces GNOME System Monitor, giving you a clean look at what your apps and hardware are actually doing.

Underneath, Apx and VSO now share the same SDK, so config handling, permissions, and logging finally work the same way across both tools instead of each doing its own thing.

Another new addition is Vanilla Continuity, a snapshot-based backup and restore tool that works alongside ABRoot. If configured properly, it can save your home directory, whatever Flatpaks you have installed, and ABRoot's own metadata.

Where those snapshots land is up to you. A local directory works by default, but you can also point Continuity at an external drive it encrypts with LUKS2, or send backups to a remote server over SFTP, FTP, or NFS.

There's also the push for community-built images through a Vanilla-Flavors org on GitHub, which currently hosts the china-image flavor, which caters to people living in mainland China.

If you want to build and maintain your own flavor, the Vanilla OS devs are open to hearing from you.

Download Vanilla OS 3

Images for Vanilla OS 3 'Reunion' are live on the official website right now. Though keep in mind that the download page will make you pick an architecture, then a donation amount.

You can enter "0" as the amount to get the free download link, or you could enter a donation amount greater than zero to directly support the project and then download the ISO.

At the time of writing, donations were not working via the PayPal integration the project has implemented.

If you're already on Vanilla OS 2 Orchid (v1.4.0), this release will arrive as a normal system upgrade. If it's taking too much time, you can run this to get the release:

abroot upgrade