It seems the GNOME team is getting quite serious about turning GNOME OS into an end-user focused Linux distribution, similar to a project KDE is working on.
GNOME OS is GNOME’s development, testing, and QA distribution. It’s not designed to be useful as a general-purpose system, and so it hasn’t been the center of attention. However, that makes it a convenient place to experiment, and ultimately through sheer coincidence the GNOME OS team ended up developing something that follows my vision using the same technology that I was. The only real difference was intent: carbonOS was intended for mass adoption, and GNOME OS was not. In essentially every other aspect, the projects had the same roadmap: following Lennart Poettering’s “Fitting Everything Together” proposal, providing a stock GNOME experience, and even using the same build system (BuildStream).
↫ Adrian Vovk
The goal with GNOME OS is to showcase the best GNOME has to offer, built on top of an immutable base system, using Flatpak as the means to install applications. Basically, we’re looking at something very similar to the immutable Fedora GNOME variant, but probably with even less modifications to stock GNOME, and perhaps with few more newer things as default, like perhaps systemd-boot over GRUB. KDE also happens to be working on a very similar project, with many of the same design choices and constraints.
I think this is an excellent idea, for both GNOME and KDE. This allows them to offer users a very focused, simple, and resilient way of showcasing the latest and greatest the two desktop environments have to offer, without having to rely on third-party distributions to not make silly choices or mess things up – for which GNOME and KDE developers then tend to take the heat. Systems like these will, of course, also be a great way for developers to quickly spin up the latest stock versions of GNOME and KDE to test their applications.
Still, there’s also a downside to having official GNOME and KDE distributions. If users find bugs or issues in these desktop environment when running other distributions, like Fedora or Ubuntu, GNOME and KDE developers may be tempted to just shrug them off and point them to the official GNOME and KDE distributions. It works there, so obviously the cause of the bug lies with the unofficial distribution, right? This may be a tempting conclusion, but may not be accurate at all, as the real cause could still lie with GNOME and KDE.
Once such “official” GNOME and KDE Linux distributions exist, the projects run a real risk of only really caring about how well GNOME and KDE work there, while not caring as much, or even at all, how well they run everywhere else. I’m not sure how they intend to prevent this from happening, but from here, I can already see the drama erupting. I hope this is something they take into consideration.
Immutable distributions are not for me, since I prefer the control regular Fedora and RPM gives me, and I don’t want to give that up. It also doesn’t help I really, really don’t like Flatpak as it exists today, which is another major barrier to entry for someone like me, and I assume most OSNews readers. However, there are countless Linux users out there who just want to get stuff done with whatever defaults come with their operating system, and for them, this newly proposed GNOME OS and its KDE counterpart are a great choice.
There’s a reason Valve opted for an Arch-based immutable KDE distribution for the Steam Deck, after all.
KDE and gnome are risking a lot with this tactic. Not so much with bringing themselves into direct competition with their revenue streams, but more spreading themselves to thin.
Running a distro is hard. And a Lot of work. DE only have so much revenue coming in to support improving their core systems, then there is the app ecosystem, adding a whole distro.. That’s risky.
It feels like the Mozzila approach, keep adding new systems and services while not investing in the core product they exist for in the first place.