DistroWatch Weekly reviews Vanilla OS 3 'Reunion,' highlighting its immutable system design, reproducible builds, new snapshot-based backup tool (Vanilla Continuity), and graphical installer supporting UEFI, encryption, and accessibility options. The distribution requires 4GB RAM and 50GB disk space, running GNOME 50 desktop with customizable first-run setup.
Nix enables instant rollbacks by using immutable store paths and symlink-based generations rather than in-place installation like apt or brew. Installing or removing packages creates new numbered snapshots without modifying existing ones, so rolling back simply repoints a symlink to a previous generation with no downloads or rebuilds needed. The tradeoff is that deleting generations doesn't immediately free disk space until garbage collection runs and no roots reference those paths.