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Without being too negative, I'd like to point out that Neon, ElementaryOS etc tried the same thing. A project thinks we need our own distro but ends up pulling

Without being too negative, I'd like to point out that Neon, ElementaryOS etc tried the same thing. A project thinks we need our own distro but ends up pulling resources away from improving the desktop environment itself. GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora, but it still dominates the Linux desktop experience.

zamadatix 1y ago
The article already talks about Neon and the pros/cons of running that kind of distro in more detail than pointed out here. > GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora What differentiates GNOME from KDE in that regard (other than it'd be Kubuntu and the Fedora KDE spin from the other perspective)?
- coffeecoders 1y ago
  Yes, the key difference is GNOME has strong downstream partners that treat it as the default (e.g. Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu). This way GNOME gets a lot of testing, polish, and feedback without having to maintain its own dist.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    I guess I'm confused on what the difference between "being the most popular Linux DE" and "being the default DE of the most popular Linux distros" is. Other than "already being most popular", what was/is KDE's partnership with these distros lacking that GNOME wasn't/isn't? Since this all happened 10-20 years prior to either Neon or KDE Linux, and KDE has long had these kinds of partnerships, I'm assuming there is some other reason/thing KDE you think KDE should be looking at. Adding on from this new comment: Given whatever differences you see for GNOME in the above, why do you think GNOME has maintained its own testing OS for the last 5 years despite this?
    - lproven 1y ago
      > I guess I'm confused on what the difference between "being the most popular Linux DE" and "being the default DE of the most popular Linux distros" is. You put the things in quotation marks but I do not see these phrases in the thing to which you're commenting. KDE is roughly a year older than GNOME. Snag: KDE was built in C++ using the semi-proprietary (dual-licensed) Qt. Red Hat refused to bundle Qt. Instead, it was a primary sponsor of GNOME, written in plain old C not C++ and using the GIMP's Gtk instead of Qt. This fostered the development of Mandrake: Red Hat Linux with built in KDE. In the late 1990s and the noughties, KDE was the default desktop of most leading Linux distros: SUSE Linux Pro, Mandrake, Corel LinuxOS, Caldera OpenLinux, etc. Most of them cost money. In 2003, Novell bought SUSE and GNOME developer Ximian and merged them, and SUSE started to become a GNOME distro. Then in 2004 along came Ubuntu: an easy desktop distro that was entirely free of charge. It came with GNOME 2. Around the same time, Red Hat discontinued its free Red Hat Linux and replaced it with the paid-for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free, unsupported Fedora Core. Fedora also used GNOME 2. GNOME became the default desktop of most Linuxes. Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, even OpenSolaris, you got GNOME, possibly unless you asked for something else. KDE became an alternative choice. It still is. A bunch of smaller community distros default to KDE, including PC LinuxOS, OpenMandriva, Mageia... but the bigger players all default to GNOME. Many of the developers of GNOME still work for Red Hat today, over 25 years on. They are on the same teams as the developers of RHEL and Fedora. This is a good reason for GNOME OS to use a Fedora basis.
      - zamadatix 1y ago
        > You put the things in quotation marks but I do not see these phrases in the thing to which you're commenting. Quotes are overloaded in that they are used for more than direct citation. In this case: to separate the "phrase" from "the sentence talking about it" (aka mention distinction - as used here as well). "s are also seen in aliases, scare quotes, highlighting of jargon, separating internal monologue, and more. If it doesn't seem to be a citation it probably wasn't meant to be one. On HN, ">" seems to be the most common way to signal a literal citation of something said. This is a fair enough, even more detailed, summary of the history, but I'm still at a loss for stitching this history to what KDE should be doing today. Similarly, for why this relationship results in good reasons for GNOME OS to exist but KDE Linux? E.g. are you saying KDE Linux should have been based on something like openSUSE (Plasma is the default there) instead of Arch, that they should have stuck to several more decades of not having a testing distro, or that they should do something completely different instead? I don't use GNOME or KDE as my DE, so I genuinely don't know what GNOME might be doing that KDE should be doing instead (and vice versa) all that deeply. The history is good, but it's hard for me to weed out what should be applying from it today. Or maybe I completely read to far into it and it was only a statement that GNOME has historically been more successful than KDE. It's known to happen to me :D.
chupasaurus 1y ago
Fedora is a side gig for GNOME maintainers, same as Neon for KDE (:
- noisy_boy 1y ago
  Guess two side gigs make a full time project because KDE on Fedora provides a great experience.
SbEpUBz2 1y ago
GNOME maintains GNOME OS.
- NekkoDroid 1y ago
  A lot of the base for GNOME OS was also used for automated testing IIRC. I don't know if that is the case for KDE Linux (or Neon).
whatevaa 1y ago
It's likely it's different people. It's volunteers mostly, they can do whatever they want.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
Gnome has its own distribution called Gnome OS. It’s based on Fedora Rawhide. It actually looks a lot what KDE is shipping here except Gnome provides it as a reference system for their developers at the moment but it’s totally usable as a user if you want to.
- lproven 1y ago
  > It actually looks a lot what KDE is shipping here No, it does not, in any way whatsoever. GNOME OS does not have dual root partitions, Btrfs with snapshots and rollback, atomic OS updates, or any of the other resilience features which are the unique selling points of KDE Linux. In case you are unfamiliar with the design of KDE Linux, I have described it in some depth: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/kde_linux_prealpha/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/kde_linux_prealpha/ And I compared it and GNOME OS here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros...
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    > No, it does not, in any way whatsoever. You mean apart from the fact that they are both immutable OS allowing the use of flatpack for software distribution? Because from where I stand they have a lot more in common than different.
  - curt15 1y ago
    Your data is out of date. Gnome OS these days uses A/B updates with dual read-only /usr partitions and verified boot in the mold of https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html.
    - lproven 1y ago
      > Gnome OS these days uses A/B updates with dual read-only /usr partitions and verified boot in the mold of https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html. Hang on. I have to say [[citation needed]] on this. I write about systemd regularly, and read Lennart's blog and Mastodon feed. As evidence, I did an in-depth on systemd 258 just a month or so ago: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/systemd_258_first_rc_here/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/systemd_258_first_rc_... I do not personally use GNOME or GNOME Boxes and I've never managed to get GNOME OS to so much as boot successfully in a hypervisor or on bare metal, and I've tried many times. But I don't think it adopts all these fancy features yet. ParticleOS does: https://github.com/systemd/particleos https://github.com/systemd/particleos But that's a separate distro. It's not GNOME OS. It's the testbed for the "fitting everything together" concepts. Adrian Vovk's CarbonOS did much of this: https://carbon.sh/ https://carbon.sh/ ... but it's dormant now. He wants to turn GNOME OS into something like that, as he has said: https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-all/ https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-... And I have written about: https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros... I am not aware it has happened yet, though.

zamadatix 1y ago

The article already talks about Neon and the pros/cons of running that kind of distro in more detail than pointed out here. > GNOME doesn’t maintain Ubuntu or Fedora What differentiates GNOME from KDE in that regard (other than it'd be Kubuntu and the Fedora KDE spin from the other perspective)?

coffeecoders 1y ago
Yes, the key difference is GNOME has strong downstream partners that treat it as the default (e.g. Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu). This way GNOME gets a lot of testing, polish, and feedback without having to maintain its own dist.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  I guess I'm confused on what the difference between "being the most popular Linux DE" and "being the default DE of the most popular Linux distros" is. Other than "already being most popular", what was/is KDE's partnership with these distros lacking that GNOME wasn't/isn't? Since this all happened 10-20 years prior to either Neon or KDE Linux, and KDE has long had these kinds of partnerships, I'm assuming there is some other reason/thing KDE you think KDE should be looking at. Adding on from this new comment: Given whatever differences you see for GNOME in the above, why do you think GNOME has maintained its own testing OS for the last 5 years despite this?
  - lproven 1y ago
    > I guess I'm confused on what the difference between "being the most popular Linux DE" and "being the default DE of the most popular Linux distros" is. You put the things in quotation marks but I do not see these phrases in the thing to which you're commenting. KDE is roughly a year older than GNOME. Snag: KDE was built in C++ using the semi-proprietary (dual-licensed) Qt. Red Hat refused to bundle Qt. Instead, it was a primary sponsor of GNOME, written in plain old C not C++ and using the GIMP's Gtk instead of Qt. This fostered the development of Mandrake: Red Hat Linux with built in KDE. In the late 1990s and the noughties, KDE was the default desktop of most leading Linux distros: SUSE Linux Pro, Mandrake, Corel LinuxOS, Caldera OpenLinux, etc. Most of them cost money. In 2003, Novell bought SUSE and GNOME developer Ximian and merged them, and SUSE started to become a GNOME distro. Then in 2004 along came Ubuntu: an easy desktop distro that was entirely free of charge. It came with GNOME 2. Around the same time, Red Hat discontinued its free Red Hat Linux and replaced it with the paid-for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free, unsupported Fedora Core. Fedora also used GNOME 2. GNOME became the default desktop of most Linuxes. Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, even OpenSolaris, you got GNOME, possibly unless you asked for something else. KDE became an alternative choice. It still is. A bunch of smaller community distros default to KDE, including PC LinuxOS, OpenMandriva, Mageia... but the bigger players all default to GNOME. Many of the developers of GNOME still work for Red Hat today, over 25 years on. They are on the same teams as the developers of RHEL and Fedora. This is a good reason for GNOME OS to use a Fedora basis.
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      > You put the things in quotation marks but I do not see these phrases in the thing to which you're commenting. Quotes are overloaded in that they are used for more than direct citation. In this case: to separate the "phrase" from "the sentence talking about it" (aka mention distinction - as used here as well). "s are also seen in aliases, scare quotes, highlighting of jargon, separating internal monologue, and more. If it doesn't seem to be a citation it probably wasn't meant to be one. On HN, ">" seems to be the most common way to signal a literal citation of something said. This is a fair enough, even more detailed, summary of the history, but I'm still at a loss for stitching this history to what KDE should be doing today. Similarly, for why this relationship results in good reasons for GNOME OS to exist but KDE Linux? E.g. are you saying KDE Linux should have been based on something like openSUSE (Plasma is the default there) instead of Arch, that they should have stuck to several more decades of not having a testing distro, or that they should do something completely different instead? I don't use GNOME or KDE as my DE, so I genuinely don't know what GNOME might be doing that KDE should be doing instead (and vice versa) all that deeply. The history is good, but it's hard for me to weed out what should be applying from it today. Or maybe I completely read to far into it and it was only a statement that GNOME has historically been more successful than KDE. It's known to happen to me :D.

chupasaurus 1y ago

Fedora is a side gig for GNOME maintainers, same as Neon for KDE (:

noisy_boy 1y ago
Guess two side gigs make a full time project because KDE on Fedora provides a great experience.

SbEpUBz2 1y ago

GNOME maintains GNOME OS.

NekkoDroid 1y ago
A lot of the base for GNOME OS was also used for automated testing IIRC. I don't know if that is the case for KDE Linux (or Neon).

whatevaa 1y ago

It's likely it's different people. It's volunteers mostly, they can do whatever they want.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

Gnome has its own distribution called Gnome OS. It’s based on Fedora Rawhide. It actually looks a lot what KDE is shipping here except Gnome provides it as a reference system for their developers at the moment but it’s totally usable as a user if you want to.

lproven 1y ago
> It actually looks a lot what KDE is shipping here No, it does not, in any way whatsoever. GNOME OS does not have dual root partitions, Btrfs with snapshots and rollback, atomic OS updates, or any of the other resilience features which are the unique selling points of KDE Linux. In case you are unfamiliar with the design of KDE Linux, I have described it in some depth: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/kde_linux_prealpha/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/kde_linux_prealpha/ And I compared it and GNOME OS here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros...
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  > No, it does not, in any way whatsoever. You mean apart from the fact that they are both immutable OS allowing the use of flatpack for software distribution? Because from where I stand they have a lot more in common than different.
- curt15 1y ago
  Your data is out of date. Gnome OS these days uses A/B updates with dual read-only /usr partitions and verified boot in the mold of https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html.
  - lproven 1y ago
    > Gnome OS these days uses A/B updates with dual read-only /usr partitions and verified boot in the mold of https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html. Hang on. I have to say [[citation needed]] on this. I write about systemd regularly, and read Lennart's blog and Mastodon feed. As evidence, I did an in-depth on systemd 258 just a month or so ago: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/systemd_258_first_rc_here/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/systemd_258_first_rc_... I do not personally use GNOME or GNOME Boxes and I've never managed to get GNOME OS to so much as boot successfully in a hypervisor or on bare metal, and I've tried many times. But I don't think it adopts all these fancy features yet. ParticleOS does: https://github.com/systemd/particleos https://github.com/systemd/particleos But that's a separate distro. It's not GNOME OS. It's the testbed for the "fitting everything together" concepts. Adrian Vovk's CarbonOS did much of this: https://carbon.sh/ https://carbon.sh/ ... but it's dormant now. He wants to turn GNOME OS into something like that, as he has said: https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-all/ https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-... And I have written about: https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros... I am not aware it has happened yet, though.