I've recently moved my laptop over to openSUSE MicroOS (specifically Kalpa, the KDE variant). It shares a bit of philosophy with Vanilla OS. However, in many ways it's almost unrecognizable as a Linux/Unix system.<p>The way it works (in my incomplete understanding) is that the root filesystem (running on Btfrs), specifically /usr and /var, are actually a read-only image. You can write changes to it, but each time you do, you have to rewrite the image. Each time you boot, you boot that immutable image.<p>This allows for easy automatic updates. And if it fails to boot after an update, it merely rolls back to the previous working image (crowdstrike take note). This seems to work well provided you don't have to modify the image too much. I installed fprintd, kdeconnect, and wine, and it's still doing OK.<p>The user applications are almost all Flatpaks. This works well most of the time, but not always. I was a heavy flatpak user before, and I will say that a number of Flatpsk bugs I've run into on other systems, I've not had on Kalpa, so perhaps its Flatpak implementation is better. The biggest issues I have are Flatpaks not being able to communicate with each other as easily as native binaries can.<p>If you don't have a Flatpak, you can always try to run it in DistroBox. This works..... OK....provided it's a userspace app. But if it's a userspace app, why not run the binary directly? Where distrobox really shines is for running .debs or .rpms on a non-native system. But those are gradually going away thanks to Flatpak anyways. Distrobox <i>does</i> have a fake root mode. I consistently run into boubdary issues with it on Kalpa. I was able to run software in distrobox that required root, and it technically ran, but it couldn't use any audio devices.<p>Overall, I find Kalpa (and MicroOS) very interesting. There are still edge cases where they break, but I was easily able to work around everything.