GNOME OS is an experimental Linux distribution that ships the latest in-development GNOME desktop, core applications, and stack. It serves as a reference for developers and testers. This operating system is designed and built around the modern systemd and GNU-based userland built from the Freedesktop SDK.

Currently, GNOME OS uses OSTree to deploy the root filesystem and manage updates. This means that the base OS is immutable (read-only) and updates can be quickly downloaded as deltas. OSTree allows easy rollback to multiple previous versions of the root filesystem, which is essential for a testing-first distribution focused on finding bugs.

Our work focuses on transitioning GNOME OS to use systemd-sysupdate. Migrating to sysupdate would bring the following benefits:
* Provide a trust chain from the bootloader, all the way up, both online and offline;
* Achieve a closer integration with systemd;
* Advance our support for image-based design and its benefits, e.g., immutability, auto-updating, adaptability, factory reset, uniformity and other modernised security properties around image-based OSes.

For that, we are adding a number of features to systemd-sysupdate to make it more production ready;
* Implement optional transfers in systemd-sysupdate
* sysupdate should allow upgrading to a newer major version
* pluggable backends for systemd-sysupdate (or systemd-import)

This project was partly inspired by Lennart Pottering's article "Brave New Trusted Boot World", in which he explains a vision of the future of Linux systems.