Personal first impressions about Vanilla OS

About a week ago I bumped into this project and, intrigued by the possibility to run software for any distro easily thanks to containerization, I decided to give it a try (in a VM of my Fedora laptop)

Long story short: I really like it! And I think that after some adjustments here and there it could be THE “general purpose distro”, a.k.a. my go-to recommendation for anyone who is new to Linux / who wants to replace MacOS and Windows.

I think that shipping the latest “stock” GNOME, together with prioritizing Flatpaks and Appimages makes the user experience fresh and enjoyable, while at the same time the Ubuntu base and the “almost-immutable” approach ensure the system stability without limiting experienced users who want to make changes to the root.

Furthermore, the implementation of distrobox to containerize packages and apps that aren’t shipped as flatpaks or appimages has exceeded my expectation, with containerized apps being flawlessly integrated with the system; making Vanilla OS the distro that, out of the box, gives its users access to the widest catalog of apps available on Linux.

However, after my short trial, I also have thought about some improvements that I would personally love to see in Vanilla OS in the future, and I decided to share them here to discuss them with the rest of the community and “contribute“ (even if indirectly) to this beautiful project.

1. Dualboot support. I know it's something that is already being worked on, but many people (including me) can't ditch windows completely and even if they are primarily using Linux they can't switch to a distro that doesn't support dualboot.
2. Full Disk Encryption support. Idk if this is something that has been already considered, but for people like me who only use a laptop and keep everything on it it's something really nice to have, especially considering that lot of other distros already offer this feature.
3. APX integration in GNOME software. As I said above, I see in VanillaOS a lot of potential to become the "general purpose" distro to recommend to anyone: from the nerd who wants to tweak everything and prefer using the terminal to the new Linux adopter who wants the most out-of-the-box experience possible. If the devs share this "vision", I think it's crucial to let users search, install and remove software from the distros repositories into apx-managed containers through GNOME software as well, without needing to touch the Terminal. I haven't an idea about how this feature could be implemented (yet) but I think it's something it worth working on.
4. Fish Shell by Default. This is probably the most personal point of my list, but after having installed and used the fish shell for a while on other distros, I really don't see a reason to keep bash instead of it (or zsh, that I haven't tried but from what I know could be a good replacement as well). I know that is it always possible for the user to change the shell but a) it's something the Linux newcomer won't probably even think about, and b) since it requires adding a PPA and installing a program from it using abroot, it's not exactly as fast and easy as it is on other distros
5. Minor improvements in APX. For those who still prefer using the terminal, I think that apx (which I really liked!) could be improved with some additional features, like automatically adding an alias for just installed apps (so that to run vscode I can just type code and not apx run code) and handle flatpaks as well with a --flatpakflag. Since I don't know how to explain what I have in mind properly, I created a simple fish function called fapx that can be added to fish shell and "wraps" both apx and flatpak commands adding the features I tried to mention. Feel free to give it a try to understand better what I mean: https://codeberg.org/LeonardoMantovani/linux_utils/src/branch/master/fapx