Vanilla OS

Reader supplied reviews for Vanilla OS Average rating 6.5 from 37 review(s) What are your thoughts on Vanilla OS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 3222.10-r7 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 2 Rating: 8 Date: 2026-07-22 Country: Türkiye Votes: 5 Solid, actually the best vision about a distro. But it needs to be developed. Its still new to town. Lets wait for it. For now you can't use tailscale. You can't really also use any tool that is like tailscale. So this is BEST choice for people who is not into tech, and just wanna use a pc for common things its for you. But if you are into tech i think we need to wait. When it gets well developed, i can't wait to use it as my daily drive distro. Like i said it really has a solid vision. I don't ever think tailscale will be usable tho. Their philosophy: "Stability is the Feature" — they'd rather remove a broken feature than ship it. That's admirable but means niche stuff like Tailscale support is low priority. IF YOU REALLY NEED TO USE TAILSCALE (Which makes me sad cuz i love it) you can use custom ISO (sucks. Needs maintaining tho) or you can use user-space tailscale. That is limited but still for basic VPN access to your tailnet? This works fine. I heard NVIDIA has problems but didn't encounter any. Waydroid is a mess but not because of the Vanila OS it is because waydroid itself is generally a mess. Not even talking about NVIDIA cards doesn't still work on waydroid. (So i heard they removed Android app support because it wasn't stable enough) But yeah. Its so user-friendly. Its like cousin of NixOS who holds hands of you and doesn't let you waste your time or brain. Also Vanilla OS will get better with the Vanilla OS 3 "Reunion". Im so excited about that. They will rewrite bunch of things. ARM64 support coming (Raspberry Pi, Apple Silicon VMs), GNOME 50 with new terminal (Ptyxis), they rebuilt their entire package infrastructure, APX GUI now on Flathub (so anyone can use it). Verdict: Vanilla OS will get more polished and stable. It grows fast. Thanks to Vanilla OS team. Especially Mirko Brombin, an Italian developer that created Bottles tho. See the obsession? His design philosophy revolves around sandboxing. That is a interesing and actual useful vision for linux future. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2 Rating: 8 Date: 2026-02-03 Votes: 1 I downloaded and installed it on a Dell XPS 13 with an SSD HD. The installation is quite easy and straightforward. It even offers you to choose what apps you want to install on your system during the setup process. The desktop (Gnome) is clean and well integrates into the system and the A/B root is quite fascinating. Unfortunately I couldn't keep using it because I was unable to setup DNSOverTLS and DNSSEC which are a must for me. Although Vanilla OS uses systemd, it does not come with systemd-resolved by default, therefore you need to use and setup something like UNBOUND DNS resolver which I was not able to make it work so I had to move on. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-11-07 Votes: 8 VanillaOS is my favorite of all immutable distro's! On my old Dell XPS 13 it is stable, clean, lightweight and fast. Gnome is clean and customizable via extensions. Second favorite is NixOS, but it keeps taking up insane amounts of disk space that I cannot clean up using all the GC methods. I see the benefit of OS tree but VanillaOS, on the other hand, uses A/B root which is transparent and easy to understand and fulfills my goal of a immutable system: being able to recover from a broken state. The only things I struggle with in VanillaOS is that it makes it hard to setup an IDE and docker environment. Because of all the virtualization capabilities using APX (which is pretty cool) it's a struggle to get apps to access the host system (no, apx export is not enough). And while it does have podman, I seem to have docker(-compose) setups that are just not compatible and fail to work without true host access. Also, no tailscale. The solution? A custom vanillaOS ISO which is a complicated process of having to setup a personal github repo that holds your configuration. So here I am, questioning if I should even be using an immutable distro :-| Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 37 reader reviews of Vanilla OS...