You can run GNOME OS on real hardware now, with a few caveats: Hardware support is limited, there is no dedicated security team, and some features are missing, including disk encryption.
This is bleeding edge, in-development software, and not recommended for daily usage if you're not a developer.
The standard GNOME OS Nightly ISO can be installed and should just work on many computers, depending on how well the hardware components are supported by Linux. If you have Intel graphics and Wifi it's likely to work without problems. We are constantly trying to improve hardware support, so if you run into issues with your specific components, please report them here.
⋮ menu select Restore Disk Image..., open the ISO and click Start Restoring.... Warning: This erases all data on the USB drive.In order to run GNOME OS you need UEFI to be enabled, and secure boot to be disabled.
Now you should have a working GNOME OS setup on real hardware. Since GNOME OS is quite different from a regular distro, here are some tips for how to do common stuff.
By default we encrypt your hard drive. We plan on eventually making the recovery passphrase part of the Initial Setup, but until then the recovery key is hardcoded and you need to manually change it.
sudo systemd-cryptenroll --recovery-key --wipe-slot=recovery /dev/disk/by-partlabel/root
GNOME OS doesn't have a traditional package manager, it does system updates using systemd sysupdate. GNOME Software should work just fine for that, but you can also do updates via terminal like so:
updatectl update
After that you can directly reboot into the new image.
If you want to install the development toolchain of GNOME OS you can do so by enabling the following System Extensions. These include compilers, headers, debug symbols along with common utilities used for GNOME development, such as flatpak-builder, GNOME Builder, podman, git and so on.
sudo updatectl enable devel debug --now
If an update breaks something, you can always boot into an older version. You can do this quickly by pressing any key during boot to enter the menu, and then choosing a different version from the list.
If you update your firmware you might be asked to manually unlock your hard drive, instead of happening automatically. This is because the state of the machine has changed without the OS knowing about it. In such case you will need to re-enroll the tpm2 values for the updated firmware keys. (We are exploring ways to make this easier in the future)
sudo systemd-cryptenroll --wipe-slot=tpm2 --tpm2-device=auto /dev/disk/by-partlabel/root