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StopDisinfo910 3 days ago

Gnome has its own distribution called Gnome OS. It’s based on Fedora Rawhide.

It actually looks a lot what KDE is shipping here except Gnome provides it as a reference system for their developers at the moment but it’s totally usable as a user if you want to.

lproven 3 days ago | parent [-]

> It actually looks a lot what KDE is shipping here

No, it does not, in any way whatsoever.

GNOME OS does not have dual root partitions, Btrfs with snapshots and rollback, atomic OS updates, or any of the other resilience features which are the unique selling points of KDE Linux.

In case you are unfamiliar with the design of KDE Linux, I have described it in some depth:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/kde_linux_prealpha/

And I compared it and GNOME OS here:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros...

curt15 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Your data is out of date. Gnome OS these days uses A/B updates with dual read-only /usr partitions and verified boot in the mold of https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html.

lproven 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Gnome OS these days uses A/B updates with dual read-only /usr partitions and verified boot in the mold of https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html.

Hang on. I have to say [[citation needed]] on this.

I write about systemd regularly, and read Lennart's blog and Mastodon feed. As evidence, I did an in-depth on systemd 258 just a month or so ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/systemd_258_first_rc_...

I do not personally use GNOME or GNOME Boxes and I've never managed to get GNOME OS to so much as boot successfully in a hypervisor or on bare metal, and I've tried many times.

But I don't think it adopts all these fancy features yet.

ParticleOS does:

https://github.com/systemd/particleos

But that's a separate distro. It's not GNOME OS. It's the testbed for the "fitting everything together" concepts.

Adrian Vovk's CarbonOS did much of this:

https://carbon.sh/

... but it's dormant now. He wants to turn GNOME OS into something like that, as he has said:

https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-...

And I have written about:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros...

I am not aware it has happened yet, though.

curt15 3 days ago | parent [-]

It was a relatively recent change [1]. Try the latest Gnome OS nightly ISO in a VM -- you'll see that they've (largely) implemented the partition scheme suggested in ParticleOS: root on btrfs, two partitions for /usr backed by dm-verity, new /usr images delivered using "systemd-sysupdate".

[1]https://www.osnews.com/story/139696/gnome-os-is-switching-fr...

lproven 2 days ago | parent [-]

Very interesting. Thanks.

I will indeed have a look, ASAP -- but I hope this version is a little more tolerant of non-GNOME/non-RH hypervisors, or I won't get far...

StopDisinfo910 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> No, it does not, in any way whatsoever.

You mean apart from the fact that they are both immutable OS allowing the use of flatpack for software distribution?

Because from where I stand they have a lot more in common than different.