Introducing GNOME OS Preview

Introducing GNOME OS Preview Written by Adrian Vovk in GNOME OS It’s been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone! TL;DR: We’re launching a new edition called “GNOME OS Preview”, which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers!

介绍 GNOME OS 预览版。作者：Adrian Vovk，发布于 GNOME OS。距离我最初发布关于将 GNOME OS 打造成终端用户通用操作系统的文章已经过去两年了。今天，我们很高兴地宣布，我们已经达成了一个重要的里程碑！简而言之：我们正在推出一个名为“GNOME OS 预览版”的新版本，它是基于最新的 GNOME 稳定版本构建的。这意味着 GNOME OS 不再仅仅是供 GNOME 开发人员和测试人员使用的每日构建版操作系统了！

The Road to Stable Even though GNOME OS has been usable on real hardware for a few years now, its appeal was limited. We’ve only had the Nightly edition, which is constantly rebuilt to ship the latest git commit of every GNOME component (and a few others, like systemd and Flatpak). This form of GNOME OS is extremely useful, since GNOME developers and designers can daily-drive it to test the latest changes. However, it’s not something we’d recommend to non-developers.

通往稳定之路。尽管 GNOME OS 在真实硬件上已经可以使用几年了，但它的吸引力仍然有限。我们此前只有每日构建版（Nightly edition），它会不断重新构建以发布每个 GNOME 组件（以及其他一些组件，如 systemd 和 Flatpak）的最新 git 提交。这种形式的 GNOME OS 非常有用，因为 GNOME 开发人员和设计师可以将其作为日常驱动来测试最新的更改。然而，我们并不建议非开发人员使用它。

Over the past year, we’ve seen a lot of adoption of GNOME OS Nightly amongst GNOME developers, especially following the success of last year’s Summer of GNOME OS challenge. This has led to a significant uptick in contributions and initiatives aimed at improving user and developer experience. For instance: Thanks to Jonas Dreßler’s, Valentin David’s, and Sebastian Wick’s zswap enablement efforts, GNOME OS now handles devices with limited amounts of RAM without OOM stalls. Jonas also found a hack that lets GNOME OS dynamically grow the usable on-disk swap space on-demand, which makes zswap perform significantly better than usual.

在过去的一年中，我们看到 GNOME 开发人员对 GNOME OS 每日构建版的采用率很高，特别是在去年“GNOME OS 之夏”挑战赛取得成功之后。这促使旨在改善用户和开发人员体验的贡献和举措显著增加。例如：得益于 Jonas Dreßler、Valentin David 和 Sebastian Wick 在 zswap 启用方面的工作，GNOME OS 现在可以处理内存有限的设备，而不会出现内存不足（OOM）导致的停滞。Jonas 还发现了一种技巧，可以让 GNOME OS 按需动态增加可用的磁盘交换空间，这使得 zswap 的性能比平时好得多。

The recently released Test Center app allows you to install CI builds of Flatpak apps from a merge request, making it super easy to test experimental changes before they are even merged. On GNOME OS Nightly, Test Center can do the same with system components by applying them as a system extension. Jordan Petridis’s new Toolpak project aims to provide a clean solution for distributing and installing command-line applications that developers need in a cross-distro fashion, similarly to how Flatpak and Flathub work for graphical apps.

最近发布的 Test Center 应用程序允许您从合并请求中安装 Flatpak 应用程序的 CI 构建版本，从而非常容易地在实验性更改合并之前对其进行测试。在 GNOME OS 每日构建版上，Test Center 可以通过将系统组件作为系统扩展应用来执行相同的操作。Jordan Petridis 的新 Toolpak 项目旨在提供一种简洁的解决方案，以跨发行版的方式分发和安装开发人员所需的命令行应用程序，类似于 Flatpak 和 Flathub 处理图形应用程序的方式。

Of course, long-term our goal is an OS for the broader public. We’re working on this across a number of different fronts, including: Enablement for systemd-homed across the stack, allowing for stronger per-user disk encryption and other benefits. Experimental work in the kernel to solve a bunch of limitations we’ve run into with filesystems. Ada Magicat went on a deep dive on her recent All Systems Go talk! Deep integration between systemd-homed and the session’s keyring, to increase security of the session’s lock screen. Dhanuka Warusadura gave a lightning talk at All Systems Go about his work on this.

当然，从长远来看，我们的目标是为广大公众提供一个操作系统。我们正在多个方面为此努力，包括：在整个堆栈中启用 systemd-homed，从而实现更强大的用户磁盘加密和其他优势。在内核中进行实验性工作，以解决我们在文件系统中遇到的一系列限制。Ada Magicat 在她最近的 All Systems Go 演讲中对此进行了深入探讨！systemd-homed 与会话密钥环之间的深度集成，以提高会话锁屏的安全性。Dhanuka Warusadura 在 All Systems Go 上就他在这方面的工作发表了闪电演讲。

A new feature-complete installer, to replace the current placeholder installer. Julian Sparber also gave a talk about this at All Systems Go, with a live demo! Support for delta updates in systemd-sysupdate, to avoid downloading a full 2 GB image every time. Better integration with the TPM, including a graphical TPM recovery UI. Currently, trying to type a TPM recovery key into Plymouth is rather difficult. Improved support for ARM hardware, including some specific models of phones. Abderrahim Kitouni gave a lightning talk at GUADEC this year about the current installation process.

一个新的功能完整的安装程序，用于替换当前的占位符安装程序。Julian Sparber 也在 All Systems Go 上就此发表了演讲，并进行了现场演示！在 systemd-sysupdate 中支持增量更新，以避免每次都下载完整的 2 GB 镜像。与 TPM 的更好集成，包括图形化的 TPM 恢复界面。目前，尝试在 Plymouth 中输入 TPM 恢复密钥相当困难。改进了对 ARM 硬件的支持，包括某些特定型号的手机。Abderrahim Kitouni 在今年的 GUADEC 上就当前的安装过程发表了闪电演讲。

Shipping our pre-installed apps as Flatpaks, and reworking the app release process to unify the build definitions between GNOME OS, the GNOME Nightly Apps Flatpak repo, and Flathub. An STF project focused on Flatpak and Portals, which will enable broader app support on GNOME OS (like VPNs!). You can learn more from the announcement blog post. Some of these areas require lots more work before they’re ready for prime time, and even once they’re ready it’s not clear that it’s possible to migrate existing GNOME OS installations to use these new features.

将我们的预装应用程序作为 Flatpak 发布，并重构应用程序发布流程，以统一 GNOME OS、GNOME Nightly Apps Flatpak 仓库和 Flathub 之间的构建定义。一个专注于 Flatpak 和 Portals 的 STF 项目，它将使 GNOME OS 能够支持更广泛的应用程序（如 VPN！）。您可以从公告博客文章中了解更多信息。其中一些领域在准备好投入使用之前还需要大量工作，即使准备就绪，也不清楚是否可以将现有的 GNOME OS 安装迁移到使用这些新功能。

At FOSDEM this year, we discussed this issue and decided that we won’t declare GNOME OS as “stable” until we can confidently commit to maintaining a clear long-term upgrade path for existing installations. However, we also don’t think that all these things need to be in place before GNOME OS can be used by more people than it is today. It’s not ready for the masses yet, but it is ready for early adopters that aren’t quite adventerous enough to run a nightly OS.

在今年的 FOSDEM 上，我们讨论了这个问题，并决定在能够自信地承诺为现有安装维护清晰的长期升级路径之前，不会宣布 GNOME OS 为“稳定版”。然而，我们也认为，并不需要所有这些条件都具备，GNOME OS 才能被比今天更多的人使用。它还没有为大众做好准备，但它已经为那些不够冒险去运行每日构建版操作系统的早期采用者做好了准备。

Introducing GNOME OS Preview GNOME OS Preview is the current GNOME OS Nightly, but without the “nightly” aspect. Instead, it’s built from the latest stable GNOME release (GNOME 51.1, at the time of writing). GNOME OS Preview lives in the same branches on GitLab as the stable org.gnome.Platform Flatpak runtimes. GNOME OS Preview is only a few weeks old, so it has only seen limited real-life testing so far. We therefore expect people will uncover some issues initially.

介绍 GNOME OS 预览版。GNOME OS 预览版就是当前的 GNOME OS 每日构建版，但去掉了“每日构建”的特性。相反，它是基于最新的 GNOME 稳定版本（撰写本文时为 GNOME 51.1）构建的。GNOME OS 预览版位于 GitLab 上与稳定版 org.gnome.Platform Flatpak 运行时相同的分支中。GNOME OS 预览版仅发布了几周，因此到目前为止，它只经过了有限的实际测试。因此，我们预计人们最初会发现一些问题。

That said, Preview is significantly more stable than Nightly, which dozens of people have been daily driving without major issues for over a year. Thus, we’re feeling confident that Preview is going to be reliable enough for daily use by non-developer enthusiasts. In all likelihood, GNOME OS Preview will be with us for a few years. However, we are explicitly not promising updates in perpetuity. If you’re not OK with re-installing your OS in a few years to switch to GNOME OS Stable, this is not for you yet.

话虽如此，预览版比每日构建版要稳定得多，后者已有数十人将其作为日常驱动使用了一年多，且没有出现重大问题。因此，我们有信心预览版将足够可靠，供非开发人员爱好者日常使用。很有可能，GNOME OS 预览版将陪伴我们几年。但是，我们明确表示不承诺永久更新。如果您无法接受在几年后重新安装操作系统以切换到 GNOME OS 稳定版，那么它现在还不适合您。

But if you’ve already been curious about giving GNOME OS a try, this is the moment! GNOME OS Preview is available for download on the newly-refreshed os.gnome.org! GNOME OS Nightly is still available from there too. As always, you can reach us on Matrix at #gnome-os:gnome.org or via the gnome-os tag on Discourse.

但如果您一直对尝试 GNOME OS 好奇，现在就是时候了！GNOME OS 预览版可在焕然一新的 os.gnome.org 上下载！GNOME OS 每日构建版也仍然可以在那里获取。一如既往，您可以通过 Matrix 上的 #gnome-os:gnome.org 或 Discourse 上的 gnome-os 标签联系我们。