GNOME developer Adrian Vovk announced the GNOME OS Preview on October 16. Until now GNOME OS was a nightly development image for testing GNOME itself; the Preview is built from stable GNOME releases, starting with GNOME 51 on Linux 7.2.6, and is meant for early adopters who want to use it day to day.

How it works

GNOME OS is an image-based system in the style of immutable distributions: the OS is updated as a whole image rather than package by package.

• Updates use systemd-sysupdate. Each update currently downloads a full image of about 2GB; delta updates are planned
• Applications are meant to come from Flatpak, and the team plans to ship the preinstalled apps that way
• zswap and dynamically growing disk swap handle memory pressure
• Toolpak is a project for distributing command-line developer tools on top of the image

Read the caveats

The developers are clear that this is not GNOME OS Stable:

• It is experimental
• There may be no seamless upgrade path to the eventual stable edition, so you might need to reinstall
• A redesigned installer, systemd-homed integration, and VPN client compatibility are still being worked on

GNOME OS will only be called stable once the team can guarantee a long-term upgrade path. Developers who want the newest code should stay on GNOME OS Nightly. Both images are at os.gnome.org.