I’m pretty sure most of you are familiar with KDE Neon, the distribution KDE maintains to provide easy access to the latest KDE technologies. However, did you know GNOME has something similar, called GNOME OS? It’s been around for a while, but has a far lower profile than KDE Neon does, and it seems they want to change that and put more of a spotlight on GNOME OS.

GNOME OS is an immutable distribution using OSTree, the same technology used by the various popular immutable versions from the Fedora family. It seems GNOME OS is working to leave OSTree behind, and move to systemd-sysupdate instead, which has been available since systemd 251, released in May 2022. The developers claim this will bring the following benefits:

• Provide a trust chain from the bootloader, all the way up, both online and offline;
• Achieve a closer integration with systemd;
• Advance our support for image-based design and its benefits, e.g., immutability, auto-updating, adaptability, factory reset, uniformity and other modernised security properties around image-based OSes.

↫ Martín Abente Lahaye, Sam Thursfield

To complete the move from OSTree to systemd-sysupdate, a few things need to be completed. First, the boot process and root filesystem had to be migrated, which was done last year. Second, sysupdate needs to integrated into GNOME, as for now, you can only use it via the command line. This work is ongoing, and requires a new D-Bus service and polkit integration to allow GNOME Software to manage the update process. Of course, there’s more work that needs to be done to complete this migration, but these are the main tasks.

All of this work is part of the project’s goal to make GNOME OS nightlies viable for daily-driving for quality assurance purposes, and I’m sure all this work will also make GNOME OS more attractive to people outside of the developer community. It’s basically GNOME/systemd taken to the extreme, and while that will surely make quite a few people groan, I personally find it great that this will make GNOME OS a more capable choice for everyone.

That’s what open source is all about, in the end.

As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We’ve now “hit the buffers” of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can’t approve any more deficit budgets – to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income.

↫ Robert McQueen

Learning that the GNOME Foundation can barely scrape by financially makes me irrationally angry. As much as I’ve grown to dislike using GNOME and thus switched all my machines over to KDE, GNOME is still the most popular desktop environment and used extensively by pretty much all the big corporate Linux distributions. How is it possible that this hugely popular and important open source project has to beg individual users for donations like they’re running an independent tech website or something?

Where’s all the financial support from Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, Canonical, and so on? If not even an insanely popular project like GNOME can be financially stable, what hope is there for the countless small, unknown open source projects that form the basis of our entire computing world?

Over the GNOME 46 cycle, VTE has seen a lot of performance improvements. Christian Hergert mentioned some of them in his blog posts about VTE and about his work in GNOME 46. But how much did the performance actually improve? What should you, the user, expect to feel after installing a fresh Fedora 40 update and launching your favorite terminal?

Let’s measure and find out!

↫ Ivan Molodetskikh

The short version is that the improvements are definitely noticeable during genera use – for the long version, read the actual article.