> 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.

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_...

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

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/

... 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-...

And I have written about:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros...

I am not aware it has happened yet, though.

It was a relatively recent change [1]. Try the latest Gnome OS nightly ISO in a VM -- you'll see that they've (largely) implemented the partition scheme suggested in ParticleOS: root on btrfs, two partitions for /usr backed by dm-verity, new /usr images delivered using "systemd-sysupdate".

[1]https://www.osnews.com/story/139696/gnome-os-is-switching-fr...

Very interesting. Thanks.

I will indeed have a look, ASAP -- but I hope this version is a little more tolerant of non-GNOME/non-RH hypervisors, or I won't get far...