Vanilla OS 3 “Reunion”: the immutable system comes to ARM64

The Vanilla OS project has announced the release of Vanilla OS 3, codenamed “Reunion.” This is an immutable Linux distribution built on Debian's testing branch; its core is protected against unwanted changes and corruption caused by third-party applications or a failed update. The new version arrives two years after the release of Vanilla OS 2 “Orchid.”

Two architectures

The main innovation is spelled out in the very name: “Reunion” brings together users of different platforms. Alongside the familiar x86_64, the system now officially supports ARM64 devices with UEFI firmware — from single-board computers to laptops and workstations on this architecture. The developers have made all the images multi-architecture, and every package is now built for ARM64 as well. According to the team, the experience on ARM64 is identical to what AMD64 offers, without any compromises in functionality.

Reproducible builds

At its heart, Vanilla OS is still driven by the ideas of security and transparency. In the third version, most images have become fully reproducible: the same source code always yields a bit-for-bit identical build result. This makes it possible to verify that a distributed image is genuinely built from the stated sources, and it serves as protection against hidden tampering. The exception is images with NVIDIA drivers — because of the kernel modules, reproducibility could not be achieved for them.

The project's mission, the authors emphasize, remains unchanged: to make a system that is simple, stable, secure and works “out of the box.”

The legacy of previous versions

Vanilla OS is built around its own technologies, familiar from earlier releases. In the immutable system, updates are carried out through the ABRoot A/B partition mechanism: changes are applied as atomic transactions between two partitions, and the system receives an exact copy of a pre-tested image through the deployment of an OCI image. If something goes wrong, you can select a previous working state at boot and roll back to it. Application management is handled by the Apx subsystem, which isolates packages in containers so that the main partition itself stays “clean.”

Stable images of Vanilla OS 3 are already available for download: the amd64 build takes up about 1872 MB, and the arm64 build roughly 1751 MB.

Source: DistroWatch