Interesting! The OS doesn't seem to be based on Debian, Arch, or RHEL, but instead seems to be its own new thing, with Flatpak as its dependency manager. Seriously considering playing with it in a VM.
Its been a while since I looked further into it, but the individual components were being built with buildstream and I think they were looking to switching the image building to mkosi with buildstream integration (from a quick look at the gnome-build-meta repo it looks like it still didn't happen).
Also a minor nitpick: I wouldn't call Flatpak a/their "dependency manager". It is more like an application manager, closer to winget than a traditional package manager.
Hmm, tried to install via QEMU/KVM and Oracle VM in an Ubuntu host and can't get the ISO come up. I chose BIOS/UEFI (all available options) without success?
I really want this to succeed and compete with the major distros.
Because stable distros like Ubuntu and Debian can be 2-4 releases behind mainline. GnomeOS would put some pressure on them to include more recent versions.
From what I can tell, GNOME OS doesn't just ship latest stable GNOME, but also goes out of its way to try to ship the latest stable Linux-ecosystem concepts too.
Its a lot harder for Fedora since they need to support 43 upgrading to 44, but also 42 to 43 to 44, 41 to 42 to 43 to 44, etc. And in some cases there is enough of a difference in those upgrade paths to cause issues, even with the immutable Silverblue (I know since I got bit by an issue that began ~2+ versions before the issue ended up being triggered!).
"You may have to re-install in the future" gives GNOME OS a massive amount of flexibility right now, when GNOME OS has fully stabilized, plus 10 or 15 years, Fedora Silverblue and GNOME OS will probably be in the same place, but until then, GNOME OS just benefits from starting later.
> "You may have to re-install in the future" gives GNOME OS a massive amount
But that means it's unusable as a daily driver? They will have to give up this approach at some point when they stabilize, so again I don't see any advantage over Fedora. If anything, what you quote is a disadvantage to me.
> I know since I got bit by an issue that began ~2+ versions before the issue ended up being triggered!
This is still something that is avoidable, it's just down to their choices where they do not remove obsolete software. I believe this should be openly communicated at upgrade time, but the previously-mandated leftovers should be removed.
In a year or so when today's top frontier AI models are free with your breakfast cereal, Gnome OS might actually be something to take seriously.
Here's my thinking: Gnome is notoriously 80% everything you ever wanted in a desktop environment and 20% "screw you, implement it yourself if you don't like it." It's been that way for decades and we all love them for it.
But obviously that level of support is not ideal in an underlying OS. However, the OS could have an automated trigger that fired any time a Gnome developer told you to go pound sand (a common enough occurrence). It would automatically ask your computer's integrated Codex or Claude equivalent coding agent to fix whatever issue you're having and to close the bug report after. Think about it! That might be an actual viable new way of running an OS distribution!
Bug fixes will just be prompts you can copy/paste! "Make this idiot's printer work. Decompile the driver and reflash the firmware if needed. Then mark the issue as resolved."
"Works on my machine" becomes a whole new thing as everyone ends up running their own bespoke AI augmented version of the base OS.
I'm sorry for how confrontational my reply is about to be, but the claim that GNOME is/looks like macOS is such a tired, boring remark. I just can't stand seeing it repeated anymore.
GNOME is opinionated as heck (often to its detriment), but it does not look/feel like macOS. GNOME looks orders of magnitude nicer than modern macOS. Rounded corners and an appreciation for some (poorly defined) ethos of "simplicity" is not the core of macOS. Implying GNOME is appreciably like macOS is as embarrassing as calling KDE a Windows knockoff. There are genuinely many many reasons to hate GNOME, but being closer to macOS than Windows on some wildly truncated spectrum of UI/UX is not one of them.
When the Alto was the only thing with windows, everything that followed looked like a Xerox Exec clone. Fifty years later, that argument rings as hallow as saying every novel is just a retelling of $LOCALITY_BASED_FIRST_NARRATIVE_FICTION.
Someone recently pointed out that they play a game to see how long it takes to scroll through HN comments and find one mentioning AI in a non-AI submission. I can't help playing the game too.
The current "Linux distro desktop" approach is just one of those bad ideas that won't go away.
Desktops work best as appliances.
If you want to do development work or want "Unix workstation" experiences and other things on a desktop then containerization can provide levels of flexibility and power that is unattainable on a traditional Linux distribution.
This sort of Gnome OS and KDE Linux OS approach is one of the better ideas to come along in a long time.
Nah, when agentic OSes become a common, the appliance dream will be fulfilled, no one would care, just like they don't care what OS runs on their DVD player.
As someone that tried to contribute to Gtkmm, and has a published article on the oldie The C/C++ Users Journal, there is hardly anything great to talk about GNOME since version 3.
One of the open source excels said this for adding 3d graphs. I found that forum post a few times over the years. I guess they finally added it but yeah there is a lot of that in open source
It's been 7 years and counting since Gnome removed the ability to set the desktop background to a solid color using the GUI. The solutions to it are to use a solid-color image, or use the "gsettings" command line tool to set the color manually... Rather than, you know, an actual basic color-picker user interface.
I even tried browsing their website and I still can't find out what it is. The blog post is just about this preview release. The about section is about the entirety of gnome.
Source: https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2026/10/16/gnome-os-previ... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123056)
Interesting! The OS doesn't seem to be based on Debian, Arch, or RHEL, but instead seems to be its own new thing, with Flatpak as its dependency manager. Seriously considering playing with it in a VM.
Its been a while since I looked further into it, but the individual components were being built with buildstream and I think they were looking to switching the image building to mkosi with buildstream integration (from a quick look at the gnome-build-meta repo it looks like it still didn't happen).
Also a minor nitpick: I wouldn't call Flatpak a/their "dependency manager". It is more like an application manager, closer to winget than a traditional package manager.
Hmm, tried to install via QEMU/KVM and Oracle VM in an Ubuntu host and can't get the ISO come up. I chose BIOS/UEFI (all available options) without success?
Got the following message on KVM:
GNOME 3.14 on QEMU/KVM 2 File Virtual Machine View Send Key
50 »mo . E
SeaBIOS (version 1.16.3-debian-1.16.3-2) Machine UUID 616b29f9-c84f-4e48-97224-9f df 00225378
iPXE (https://ipxe.org) 01:00.0 CAGE PCIZ.10 PnP PMM+7EFCASEO+7EFOASEO CAOO
Booting from DUD/CD...
Boot failed: Could not read from CDROM (code 0009) Booting from Hard Disk...
Boot failed: not a bootable disk
No bootable device.
--------------------------------------
Is the ISO bootable via a VM?
Home page should probably add VM install instructions :)
I really want this to succeed and compete with the major distros.
Because stable distros like Ubuntu and Debian can be 2-4 releases behind mainline. GnomeOS would put some pressure on them to include more recent versions.
But there's also Fedora and I don't honestly see how GnomeOS can be better than them.
From what I can tell, GNOME OS doesn't just ship latest stable GNOME, but also goes out of its way to try to ship the latest stable Linux-ecosystem concepts too.
Its a lot harder for Fedora since they need to support 43 upgrading to 44, but also 42 to 43 to 44, 41 to 42 to 43 to 44, etc. And in some cases there is enough of a difference in those upgrade paths to cause issues, even with the immutable Silverblue (I know since I got bit by an issue that began ~2+ versions before the issue ended up being triggered!).
"You may have to re-install in the future" gives GNOME OS a massive amount of flexibility right now, when GNOME OS has fully stabilized, plus 10 or 15 years, Fedora Silverblue and GNOME OS will probably be in the same place, but until then, GNOME OS just benefits from starting later.
(Not saying either is better than the other)
> "You may have to re-install in the future" gives GNOME OS a massive amount
But that means it's unusable as a daily driver? They will have to give up this approach at some point when they stabilize, so again I don't see any advantage over Fedora. If anything, what you quote is a disadvantage to me.
> I know since I got bit by an issue that began ~2+ versions before the issue ended up being triggered!
Indeed, these things happen, e.g. this discussion literally from today: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/1x7zgol/fedora_45_h...
This is still something that is avoidable, it's just down to their choices where they do not remove obsolete software. I believe this should be openly communicated at upgrade time, but the previously-mandated leftovers should be removed.
In a year or so when today's top frontier AI models are free with your breakfast cereal, Gnome OS might actually be something to take seriously.
Here's my thinking: Gnome is notoriously 80% everything you ever wanted in a desktop environment and 20% "screw you, implement it yourself if you don't like it." It's been that way for decades and we all love them for it.
But obviously that level of support is not ideal in an underlying OS. However, the OS could have an automated trigger that fired any time a Gnome developer told you to go pound sand (a common enough occurrence). It would automatically ask your computer's integrated Codex or Claude equivalent coding agent to fix whatever issue you're having and to close the bug report after. Think about it! That might be an actual viable new way of running an OS distribution!
Bug fixes will just be prompts you can copy/paste! "Make this idiot's printer work. Decompile the driver and reflash the firmware if needed. Then mark the issue as resolved."
"Works on my machine" becomes a whole new thing as everyone ends up running their own bespoke AI augmented version of the base OS.
The future is now.
> Gnome is notoriously 80% everything you ever wanted in a desktop environment
their pivot from highly customisable kde-like experience to look more mac-like actually dropped that 80% towards 0 for me.
Also, fundamentally: for a Desktop ui to ask by default for more than one bar to stick into your desktop space is just greedy.
I'm sorry for how confrontational my reply is about to be, but the claim that GNOME is/looks like macOS is such a tired, boring remark. I just can't stand seeing it repeated anymore.
GNOME is opinionated as heck (often to its detriment), but it does not look/feel like macOS. GNOME looks orders of magnitude nicer than modern macOS. Rounded corners and an appreciation for some (poorly defined) ethos of "simplicity" is not the core of macOS. Implying GNOME is appreciably like macOS is as embarrassing as calling KDE a Windows knockoff. There are genuinely many many reasons to hate GNOME, but being closer to macOS than Windows on some wildly truncated spectrum of UI/UX is not one of them.
When the Alto was the only thing with windows, everything that followed looked like a Xerox Exec clone. Fifty years later, that argument rings as hallow as saying every novel is just a retelling of $LOCALITY_BASED_FIRST_NARRATIVE_FICTION.
That is a very fair assessment I feel. Also there's nothing wrong with being confrontational, we will not thrive on uniformity.
I agree there is nothing wrong with it, but I genuinely appreciate the grace all the same.
Someone recently pointed out that they play a game to see how long it takes to scroll through HN comments and find one mentioning AI in a non-AI submission. I can't help playing the game too.
LOL. I love how you read someone else's smug comment and thought to yourself that repeating it would be so cool!
The current "Linux distro desktop" approach is just one of those bad ideas that won't go away.
Desktops work best as appliances.
If you want to do development work or want "Unix workstation" experiences and other things on a desktop then containerization can provide levels of flexibility and power that is unattainable on a traditional Linux distribution.
This sort of Gnome OS and KDE Linux OS approach is one of the better ideas to come along in a long time.
Nah, when agentic OSes become a common, the appliance dream will be fulfilled, no one would care, just like they don't care what OS runs on their DVD player.
As someone that tried to contribute to Gtkmm, and has a published article on the oldie The C/C++ Users Journal, there is hardly anything great to talk about GNOME since version 3.
One of the open source excels said this for adding 3d graphs. I found that forum post a few times over the years. I guess they finally added it but yeah there is a lot of that in open source
It's been 7 years and counting since Gnome removed the ability to set the desktop background to a solid color using the GUI. The solutions to it are to use a solid-color image, or use the "gsettings" command line tool to set the color manually... Rather than, you know, an actual basic color-picker user interface.
The threads about it are awesome.
Article could do with a short paragraph explaining what Gnome OS is.
I even tried browsing their website and I still can't find out what it is. The blog post is just about this preview release. The about section is about the entirety of gnome.