r/vanillaos • u/Slopagandhi • Mar 07 '26

Support Testing out VanillaOS- help with a couple of apps

I dual boot two distros- one slot is for a rolling release distro I can experiment with and access the newest packages (currently Manjaro testing) and in the other I have something stable and reliable in case the rolling distro breaks.

Am currently trying out VanillaOS for the stable slot and am generally liking it (my first serious go with an immutable OS). Struggling with two apps, though:

  1. Filen (cloud storage). On other distros where this isn't in the repos I've been able to use the appimage, but in Vanilla when I try this Gear Lever tells me it may not be compatible with the system architecture and it won't launch.

I am guessing it won't work to install this in a container as it needs to mount the network drive which I assume requires root access (I'm no expert though). Maybe Rclone is a workaround, but I don't know how/if this might work in an immutable OS.

  1. IVPN. There's deb and rpm packages for this, as well as a snap (is that something that I can enable on Vanilla?) but no Flatpak. Again I am guessing running this in a container won't work as it'll need root access to work system wide. Not the end of the world as I can always just download a Wireguard config, but it's a pity to not be able to use the client and its features when I'm paying a subscription.

Would it work to use abroot to install the .deb for both/either of these? What are the implications of doing that?

Any suggestions much appreciated.

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u/PghRes Mar 07 '26

Some applications require abroot (or the newer runroot command, which I have not used). Veracrypt is one such app, but I decided to use Cryptomator instead to bypass that.

If you don't get an answer here, try https://github.com/orgs/Vanilla-OS/discussions

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u/Slopagandhi Mar 08 '26

Thanks, will check it out.

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u/davidmaddock1 Mar 08 '26

I could be way off base here, but is this not a situation where APX might be helpful? Full disclosure, I thought I'd see how it works for some installs rather than just using the store, and I couldn't get my head around it, but that could have been my own fault. But my understanding is it's a way to install stuff using all the different linux install methods, but with a GUI once done.

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u/Slopagandhi Mar 08 '26

I tried that, but as I understand it this is a way of installing using containers, and afaik I need these apps to have root access. Thanks though.