GNOME developer Jordan Petridis published a blog post today to introduce the world to the Toolpak plans for GNOME OS.

While Flatpak works great for desktop Linux apps and other containerized software solutions for different applications, they tend to not work out so well for developers working on developing software for the modern OS stack. For many development tools it's not possible today to enjoy sandboxing and confinement but for now the GNOME OS developers are pursuing Toolpak as a modern alternative.

Toolpak is taking a design approach that tools like QEMU, strace, and other developer tools are all independent of the host OS and that tools should work out-of-the-box without needing to modify them all. So the approach they are taking with Toolpak is leveraging UAPI.3 discoverable disk images as their image format, a mount namespace for binaries, tools have unrestricted access to everything else, tools are prepending to the $PATH, tools have complete and arbitrary access to the system, and apps that can be packaged using Flatpak should be rejected from this more liberal Toolpak concept.

Toolpak also aims to be reproducible by default, handle all licensing and SBOM requirements, easy to orchestrate builds, and other modern development needs and deliverables. GNOME OS developers are currently working toward a prototype of Toolpak and they plan to share more in the weeks ahead.

Early details on their Toolpak concept can be found via blogs.gnome.org.