It was announced a while back that they were going to look at making it an end-user OS as well. The actual, new announcement [1] says that they've produced the first Preview release for it, with the caveat:

> In all likelihood, GNOME OS Preview will be with us for a few years. However, we are explicitly not promising updates in perpetuity. If you’re not OK with re-installing your OS in a few years to switch to GNOME OS Stable, this is not for you yet. But if you’ve already been curious about giving GNOME OS a try, this is the moment!

I'm sceptical that that brought Flatpak top-of-mind however.

[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2026/10/16/gnome-os-previ...

I have no knowledge on the subject, but developing and testing on a distribution only Gnome developers will ever use does seem very on brand for modern Gnome