As such, I am curious to know how the custom image ecosystem of Vanilla OS is. Like, does something like this exist for Vanilla OS? (FWIW, there was another website that made browsing through these a better experience. But, sadly, I couldn’t find it.)
Well, there is Vib, and there are various custom images out there, but sadly i am not aware of any single website that list them. It’s all in all a much smaller project than uBlue and in things like that it shows.
Well, i am in no way affiliated with the developer team or the project in general and yes, there was some time when everything looked a bit… stalled… but at the moment it looks like they got back their motivation.
is it sensible to be enthusiastic about this project’s future at this point?
No, absolutely not. The chance that VanillaOS becomes a major distribution in the Linux world is minimal and there is the high probability that they just throw the towel at some point in the future. I mean, its like that time when somebody whose name i cannot remember started a Minix clone just for fun as a hobby project…
It’s Debian Sid based so I assume you find the Kernel used therein in VanillaOS
In general it is -as mentioned by @h3ron@lemmy.zip- an immutable, Debian based distribution with GNOME. It uses a quiet interesting system called ABRoot for doing updates. I use it on one of my spare machines now since they did the switch from Ubuntu base to Debian and honestly i like it.
I did use it a couple of years ago extensively, but moved back to the basics later on: Termux and Rsync.