Now on the way from none other than the GNOME project--creators of the widely used for Linux by the same name--is a brand-new operating system called , which is scheduled to arrive in 2014.

Rather than serve as a brand-new , however, the upcoming GNOME OS "is primarily intended as a platform for testing and development," wrote GNOME user experience (UX) designer Allan Day in a following the recent GNOME developers conference.

'A Better Experience for Developers'

"The idea of GNOME OS has been around for a couple of years, and there has been a fair amount of confusion about what it means," Day explained. "Some people seem to have assumed that GNOME OS is an effort to replace distributions, so let me be clear: that is not the case."

Instead, by "providing a better experience for application developers, automated testing, sandboxed applications, and broad hardware compatibility," among other goals, the project hopes to improve the GNOME desktop that ultimately is made available for other distributions' use, he added.