carbonOS is designed to be minimal and intuitive
The release of the new version of carbonOS 2022.3 and in this new version a large number of updates have been implemented, as well as improvements to the desktop environment and much more.
For those who are unaware of carbonOS I can tell you that this is a distribution based on the atomic system design model, where the base environment is delivered as a single whole, not split into separate packages. Additional applications are installed in Flatpak format and run in isolated containers.
The content of the underlying system mounts read-only to protect against modifications in case of compromise. It can write to the /usr/local partition. Btrfs is used as a file system with stored data compression enabled and snapshots are actively used.
Main novelties of carbonOS 2022.3
In this new version of the system that is presented we will be able to find a large number of update packages, of which the Linux 6.0 kernel is included.
For the part of the changes that we can find in the new version has discontinued the development of its own GDE user environment (Graphite Desktop Environment), based on GNOME. Instead of GDE, the distribution uses regular GNOME and a set of patches that improve the interface and have a chance to break into the main GNOME.
In this new version of carbonOS 2022.3 using GNOME made it possible to move to IBus for the processing of input and enabling facilities for people with disabilities, in addition to changed systemd-oomd to be less aggressive when terminating applications when the system runs out of memory.
It also stands out that Distrobox is included, which allows the user to be able to install and run any Linux distribution in a container and guarantee its integration with the main system.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- The nsbox containerization toolkit has been removed from the distribution.
- This is supposed to be a temporary step and nsbox will be returned to the distribution after its processing work is complete and it becomes stable.
- NVIDIA Support: All the bits are in place, but they're still not quite set correctly and the OS will likely not boot. This still needs a bit more work, and probably a special NVIDIA-specific OS version. There is also a major known issue:
- “Installation Failed” error during installation – If you have followed the installation instructions linked from the warning banner at the top of this page, you may still see an “Installation Failed” error message after it finishes installation. This is a known issue and the installation may have been successful. You can ignore that error and just reboot.
If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details In the following link.
Download and get carbonOS 2022.3
For those interested in being able to test this distribution, they should know that to install the distribution a graphical installer and interface for initial system configuration is provided. User-installed apps are isolated from each other in containers.
In addition to installing Flatpak packages, the distribution also allows you to use the nsbox toolkit to create custom containers, which can also host traditional distribution environments like Arch Linux and Debian. It also provides support for the podman toolkit, which provides compatibility with Docker containers. The distribution implements a centralized Polkit-based permissions management mechanism: sudo is not supported and the only way to run commands as root is with pkexec.
The project develops its own GDE user environment (Graphite Desktop Environment) based on GNOME. Among the differences from GNOME: improved login screen, configurator, volume and brightness indicators, panel and Graphite Shell. In the next release, we intend to drop maintenance of our shell in favor of the regular GNOME Shell and move on to promoting improvements developed by the project to the main GNOME composition.
The size of the installation image is 2 GB and they can get the image from the following link.