Really my main point of doing this was to try something different. I’ve been neutral on flatpak this whole time. I’ve never had problems with native installs, but I’m also a little judicious on what I try to install on my systems. The point of this exercise was to flip those habits.

About flatpaks, I’ve learned:

• a ton of stuff I installed via AUR is available as a flatpak
• some flatpak apps seem to be a little less buggy than the native installs for some reason… (Thunderbird specifically)
• flatpaks use more disk space

Distrobox has also been cool because I usually don’t like to install random crap on my machine, but with Distrobox I’ve been doing just that. I can install random C++ libraries, Node, Haskell, Postgres, etc and not worry about polluting my main system I actually care about. In the past, I would take some time to consider if I should really install this random thing. And yes, I’d pacman -Rs pkg if it didn’t pan out.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep running the system like this, but so far it’s been interesting to run things a little differently.

Things I’ve liked:

• Thunderbird flatpak is less buggy than Thunderbird native
• Managing flatpak apps via Software Center or flatpak is easy/nice
• Distrobox seems useful for working on different types of software projects

Things I don’t personally care about (but other people might and that’s fine):

• using more disk space
• the fact that my main system is still mutable

Things I didn’t like:

• nothing so far
• I actually went in thinking I was gonna have to fight
• with the flatpak permissions, but everything has worked
• fine so far, so… not sure what I don’t like.
• maybe I’ll hit a snag soon and then I’ll change my mind

Honestly, just because I’m the most comfortable in Arch. I tried VanillaOS briefly, but it was way too annoying to install tailscale, so I went back to what I know.

Luckily, I’m able to afford more than an 8GB SSD on my laptop. 😆

$ podman system df
TYPE           TOTAL       ACTIVE      SIZE        RECLAIMABLE
Images         2           1           2.775GB     2.293GB (83%)
Containers     1           0           3.492GB     3.492GB (100%)
Local Volumes  2           2           0B          0B (0%)

$ flatpak list | wc -l
65
$ du -hs /var/lib/flatpak
12G	/var/lib/flatpak

$ df -h
Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/cryptroot  234G   31G  191G  14% /

A 256GB drive is on the smaller side and I’m barely at 14%. Storage is cheap.

I recently brought over some ideas from VanillaOS over to my Arch install.

1. Install as much as possible via flatpak
2. Install a bunch of other stuff in distrobox (with podman backend)

That gives me like 50% (idk fake number) of the features from VanillaOS, but I get to keep control over my system.

Not that I ever had any problems with native pacman installs though… so… not sure how much benefit I’m really getting from doing this. I guess my pacman -Syu command runs faster now. That’s something…

Holy moly, I did not know this existed! Thanks! Just turned this on!

I just sold my Framework 13 after daily driving it for a year. The HiDPI display bugs and workarounds just got too annoying.

I went back to my old Dell XPS 13 9310 and I’m loving it.

Any resources you’d recommend?

I suspect that it goes down and stays down whenever there is an app update, but I haven’t confirmed it yet.

Does the plain wireguard app stay up during updates?

if the cameras don’t load, open Tailscale and make sure it’s connected

I’ve been using Tailscale for a few months now and this is my only complaint. On Android and macOS, the Tailscale client gets randomly killed. So it’s an extra thing you have to manage.

It’s almost annoying enough to make me want to host my services on the actual internet… almost… but not yet.

Interesting. I’m saving this for later.

Yay! Good job. Keep going!

Neat. I’ve been getting more curious about WebDAV recently. Also, great website! Thanks for posting!

Neat. I’ll have to check this out as well. Thanks!

One thing I’m doing differently in Arch this time is I’m trying out installing as many things as possible as flatpaks. I’ve successfully ignored them until now. Surprisingly, a lot of my apps are already packaged as flatpaks.

The other thing I’m borrowing is distrobox+podman. I didn’t know about that before. This seems useful for dev environments.

flatpaks + distrobox seem to be at least 50% of VanillaOS. So I’m borrowing those and then I get to keep the simple, mutable OS with Arch.

That being said, I’ve never had a problem with pacman breaking my system, so I don’t see major value in doing this… other than… it’s helping me procrastinate! I should be doing real work right now. 😄

Oh’laville: https://www.youtube.com/@Ohlaville

Ooooh, ok. Missed that.

Hi, it isn’t possible to install Tailscale inside the VSO container since it needs to interface with the host, for this case, I would suggest using a custom image following this template and rebase to it using ABRoot -> https://github.com/Vanilla-OS/custom-image.

Aw, dang. ok.

I’m like 12 hours in. It’s not going too well right now… the biggest con is that there is basically no documentation for Orchrid…

My use case: I have Obsidian notes synced with Syncthing to a server only accessible via Tailscale. I was able to get Syncthing working by installing Syncthing GTK from Flathub (a workaround, I couldn’t figure out how to install Syncthing the normal way). But I’m still out of luck because I can’t reach the server.

The only way to install Tailscale is via a custom image it seems. :(

The other thing I haven’t figured out is if it’s possible to use wl-copy to copy text from a terminal. The terminal app basically opens into a container. It seems like wl-copy can’t break out of the container and affect the host clipboard.

The container/isolation stuff seems kewl in theory, but so far I’m finding it pretty annoying.

I’m experimenting with this because I was wondering if VanillaOS would be a good fit for my parents, which actually, it might be. They have very basic needs. All their apps are on Flathub. But for me… I think I may just go back to Arch.

You mean the post that talks about the successful install that doesn’t run? 😅

this post covers the successful install of tailscale on VanillaOS, however I cannot get it to run.

Also, that’s from 2 years ago on VanillaOS Kinetic, not Orchrid. 😢

Oh, wait. Derp. Sorry. I need to RTFM.

$ vso sys 
Execute system commands, such as upgrading the system

Usage:
  vso sys [command]

Aliases:
  sys, sys-upgrade

Available Commands:
  check       Check for system updates
  upgrade     Execute system commands, such as upgrading the system

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for sys

Use "vso sys [command] --help" for more information about a command.

The command got renamed.

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