At the GUADEC conference in Spain, GNOME's annual conference for developers, some of the core developers have decided to go ahead with a concept they are calling GNOME OS.

Before you start rolling your eyes, expecting Yet-Another-Linux-Distro, let me reveal that is is slightly more complicated than that.

As explained by Allan Day, a Red-Hat user experience designer, the primary use of GNOME OS will be testing, development and consolidation of featues to directly improve the GNOME project itself and what it will further offer to Distributions.

While this idea has been around for some time now, it was during GUADEC this year,in a GNOME OS BoF(Birds of Feather) meeting, that a project plan for the next 18 months was wrought.

Following are some of the intended goals of GNOME OS:

• Application development and deployment : The main idea behind this goal is to have a stable Application Framework with less shifting APIs. This will enable GNOME developers to produce applications which can be compatible over years rather than a shorter span of time.
• SDK : KDE already has the Qt SDK and the awesome QtCreator. It's way overdue to have something on the same level for GNOME to make it easier for developers to create and deploy applications.
• Testable : Creating a new build system for GNOME and a standalone OS for testing and development is one of the main points in this agenda. This will enable users to build and test GNOME and it's applications on a more stable environment.
• Core UX : A decision to define a new way for accessing content  was taken in order to deliver the complete GNOME 3 experience. Revamping of GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) is one of the tasks which is already underways.
• New types of devices : The main objective of this goal is to support the increasing range of devices and form-factors where GNOME can be deployed. Especially touch devices like tablets would be taken into consideration.

Although some of these goals may sound ambitious, Allan is hopeful that the 18-month timeline that they have set for themselves will help in realizing most of them.

You can read more about GNOME OS and the philosophy behind it, directly Allan's blog.