I really liked this distro when I tried it when 3 first released. I’m on Debian stable gnome and may just switch over to get gnome 51 because gnome 48 is feeling a little too old at this point.

I already use flatpaks for everything so that won’t change much at all anyway.

I’ve been using Vanilla OS on my laptop since August 2024. It has been a great experience aside from two major updates breaking my system.

The first was in June 2025 when an update fucked my mail client and I had to manually edit some config files to fix it.

The second was in August this year (2026) when the update fucked an important program that I had compiled in, and exported from, the main Vanilla OS container that starts when you start the terminal. For some reason they changed the main container used by the terminal and so everything I had done in the previous one was gone.

It’s annoying that they don’t have enough testing to identify these showstopping issues before releasing, but this is the nature of niche distros. The users are the testers.

Sooner or later I will be reformatting this laptop with something more reliable, but it’s unfortunate because Vanilla OS is a great base OS to build on. I hope they can sort out their QA for future releases to prevent issues that break backwards compatibility.

So they’ve upgraded to 7.2, which is EOL as of a week ago. And not even the latest 7.2 version, they ship .11 when .15 is the latest.