VanillaOS 22.10 GNOME

About VanillaOS

Vanilla OS rethinks the desktop as an appliance. The system is immutable: its core is read-only, and changes land through ABRoot, a transactional mechanism that stages updates in an alternate root and switches over atomically, so a failed update cannot leave the machine half-broken and the previous state remains bootable. Applications live apart from the base, primarily as Flatpaks, while the apx tool creates containerized subsystems on demand, letting users pull packages from several different distribution ecosystems inside sandboxes without touching the host. The project began on an Ubuntu base and later moved to building its own images directly from Debian. The desktop is intentionally stock GNOME, free of heavy branding. Vanilla OS suits people curious about where atomic desktops are heading and anyone tired of systems that degrade over time. An OpenFactory browser VM is a fitting sandbox in which to study a system built around sandboxes.

What happens when you press Try now

The button opens the OpenFactory console in a new tab and boots a fresh VanillaOS virtual machine from OpenFactory's verified source media. The session renders directly in the browser, so there is nothing to download and nothing to install on your computer.

Each visit gets its own machine with a fresh overlay over an immutable base image. Files, settings, and desktop changes behave normally inside the session and are discarded when it ends, so every visitor starts from the same clean VanillaOS 22.10 GNOME.

How GNOME behaves in a browser VM

GNOME organizes work around the Activities overview: one keyboard-friendly surface for launching apps, switching windows, and searching. Current releases ship a curated GTK application set and a Wayland session by default.

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