Adrian Vovk, creator of the atomically updatable distribution carbonOS and the installer for GNOME OS, as well as one of the developers of systemd-homed and systemd-sysupdate, announced an initiative to transform GNOME OS from a distribution for testers and developers of GNOME into a general-purpose distribution suitable for everyday use by average users.
Adrian also announced the cessation of development of the carbonOS distribution as an independent project using its own package base. However, the carbonOS project will continue to exist, but its development is now planned within the GNOME project as part of GNOME OS or as a fork of GNOME OS, investing resources into the development of GNOME OS. The development of GNOME OS employs a similar view on how the OS should be structured and the same technologies as in carbonOS, with the fundamental difference being that the carbonOS distribution was developed as an OS for mass deployment, while GNOME OS is a project for supporting the development and testing of GNOME.
Summarizing his experience with the carbonOS distribution, Adrian concluded that an operating system suitable for ordinary users should possess the following properties:
- Delivery of an unmodified GNOME desktop environment and standard application suite, in the form and combination provided by the GNOME developers.
- Installation of additional programs in Flatpak format.
- System resilience against user actions or after installing updates. The ability to quickly restore the state through rollback of changes.
- Immutability of the base environment across all systems and atomic updates through complete replacement of the system image, which enhances reliability and simplifies problem diagnosis.
- Security — the use of mechanisms such as encryption of user data, verified boot, and advanced technologies like systemd-homed.
- A modern software stack that employs components like Wayland, Pipewire, XDG portals, and so on.
- Flexibility and adaptability for various form factors (PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones) and ease of creating builds optimized for specific hardware.
- Odbúranie potreby používateľov robiť zbytočné rozhodnutia, napríklad používateľ sa nemusí zaoberať výberom formátu balíkov pri inštalácii aplikácií.
Zdroj: opennet.ru
