The first release of the user-friendly Linux distribution carbonOS has been presented, built using a system atomic composition model, where the base environment is provided as a single unit, not broken into separate packages. Additional applications are installed in Flatpak format and run in isolated containers. The size of the installation image is 1.7 GB. The project's developments are distributed under the MIT license.
The contents of the base system are mounted in read-only mode to protect against modification in the event of a compromise (there are plans to incorporate data encryption and file integrity verification via digital signatures in the future). The /usr/local directory is writable. The system update process involves downloading a new system image in the background and switching to it after a restart. The old system image is preserved, allowing the user to revert to the previous version at any time, should issues arise or if desired. During the development of the distribution, the core of the system environment is assembled using the OSTree toolkit (the image is formed from a Git-like repository) and the BuildStream build system, without using packages from other distributions.
User-installed applications are isolated from each other in containers. In addition to Flatpak package installation, the distribution also allows the use of the nsbox toolkit for creating arbitrary containers, which can include environments from traditional distributions such as Arch Linux and Debian. Support is also provided for the podman toolkit, ensuring compatibility with Docker containers. A graphical installer and an initial system configuration interface are offered for the installation of the distribution.
The file system used is Btrfs with compression of stored data enabled and active snapshot implementation. To handle memory shortages, systemd-oomd is used, and instead of a separate swap partition, the swap-on-zram technology is employed, allowing pages of memory that need to be evicted to be stored in a compressed form. The distribution features a centralized permission management system based on Polkit—sudo is not supported, and the only way to execute commands with root privileges is through pkexec.
The project develops its own user environment GDE (Graphite Desktop Environment), based on GNOME 42 and including applications from the GNOME supply. Among the differences from GNOME are the upgraded login screen, configurator, volume and brightness indicators, the panel, and the Graphite Shell environment. An application manager based on GNOME Software is used to manage system updates. PipeWire is utilized for handling multimedia streams. Built-in support for various multimedia codecs is provided.
Source: opennet.ru
