this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
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 think what I would have expected in this situation would have been for the upgrade to have prompted me to read the changelog before starting, and I would have expected the changelog to describe in detail what was going to be broken and what the steps would be to fix it.