Personally, I wouldn’t recommend Vanilla OS.

• They released v1 based off a non-LTS Ubuntu released and then quickly stopped supporting it while they worked on v2. No security updates.
• They released v2 with no upgrade path from v1. v2 was based on either Debian Testing or Sid. It did not regular receive updates. Right now the website says that last updates were released in January. Presumably they stopped working on it to work on v3.
• I’m not sure if you can upgrade from v2 to v3. A fresh install is probably necessary.
• Mirko founded Vanilla OS but his main focus now seems to be Sinty OS.
• On a petty note, the website makes you opt out of sharing and selling your personal info to third parties.

That’s a lot of churn and issues for such as young project that advertises itself to new users.

Sorry, I should note that 26.3 is not released yet. This is a “snapshot”, aka a development build. The full version of 26.3 will be released in a couple of months.

I updated the title to reflect that 26.3 is not released yet.

Definitely agree, particularly when it comes to security.

Valve takes a snapshot of Arch repos, frozen in time. They then spend months developing on top of this version. And by the time it’s released, it’s multiple months out of date. They don’t pull in security updates; Arch is a rolling release, they don’t backport fixes like Debian or Fedora does.

Definitely misremembering.

Technically yes, practically no.

Windows doesn’t include the drivers to read Linux file systems (except through WSL) and Vanguard sure doesn’t either.

If you encrypt your disks, then it definitely can’t.

Now I wish I didn’t upgrade to 26.5 from 15 a couple weeks ago. I could’ve entirely avoided the worst parts of 26 design.