GNOME Wants to Let You Test Experimental Features Without Breaking Anything

Testing experimental software is a hassle right now. You either wait for a stable release, or you dive into the pit of nightly builds hoping the whole thing doesn't fall on your head.

That gets worse on image-based systems like GNOME OS, where the base image is read-only and you can't just swap out a package and move on.

GNOME wants to fix that with a new app it's prototyping, tentatively called Test Center.

Something new to tackle testing

It is meant to act as a one-stop solution for installing, running, and removing anything experimental, whether that's an app or a piece of the system itself.

For apps, you skip the usual grind of hunting down CI artifacts or building your own Flatpak bundle by hand. A developer hands you a link, you tap it, and the build shows up tagged as experimental, set to expire on its own.

System components run on sysext images instead of Flatpaks, though the idea plays out the same way. Take something like parental controls, still early in development, you'd grab the sysext tied to that merge request through Test Center, and it lands on your system as an overlay rather than a replacement.

Remove it, and you restore your system to the same state before the experimental change was applied.

Plus, there's a good reason system-level testing has been such a mess up to now.

According to Modal Collective, the closest thing on a regular package-based distro is packaging your changes into an unofficial repo like a COPR or PPA and asking testers to install from there themselves.

Once they do, the experimental packages don't sit next to the stable ones, they replace them outright. Break something, and it's on you to fix it. You won't get proper updates again until you do.

What's next?

All this effort is part of the GNOME OS Developer Tool Suite, a project that's been in funding through Germany's Prototype Fund since June 2026. Tobias Bernard, Jonas Dreßler, and a few others are working on this under the Modal Collective umbrella.

In a related plan, an easier way to distribute command-line developer tools on image-based systems is also part of the same project, though the team says more details on that are coming in a separate post.

If you're developing for GNOME OS and have opinions on what's currently annoying about testing and development workflows, the team wants to hear from you on Matrix, in the #gnome-os room, or in person at the GNOME OS BoF during GUADEC.