The GNOME Project Opens Its Own OS to Everyone The GNOME project has released a public GNOME OS preview. It ships with the GNOME 51.1 desktop. Most people meet GNOME through distributions such as Fedora Linux or Ubuntu. GNOME OS is different. The project builds it as a complete Linux system. It joins the desktop, core components, and update mechanism into one bootable image for testing and showcasing the GNOME software stack.