I was extremely surprised that the GNOME Project has its own operating system, but, it is for developers only.
Why not to make GNOME OS for everyone?
First of all, it will increase the popularity of the GNOME platform. If someone learns about GNOME, they will not have to figure out which OS with GNOME to choose.
For example, if some people want to try GNOME, they would have to choose between Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, etc. Many-many-many systems which uses the GNOME.
Choosing between a bunch of different distributions from different devs, that distribute GNOME, or GNOME OS from the GNOME developers themselves would make the choice a lot obviously.
How to make GNOME OS for devs and regular users?
By default in GNOME OS would stable apps and GNOME version.
For developers or testers could make some kind of dev mode, which would download and switch all default applications, components and shell to the Nightly version.
The idea is to be able to switch between GNOME OS and GNOME OS Nightly on the fly, this will allow anyone to see developer version of GNOME applications or the GNOME shell.
GNOME does not have enough resources to work on a whole OS for regular users. Things like hardware enablement and security are not really feasible with a volunteer-based approach, and most of the companies using GNOME already have their own OS, so they understandably won’t commit resources to GNOME for that.
You’re free to use GNOME OS on your own hardware, but you get to keep both the pieces when things break, or when your hardware isn’t supported, or when a security issue gets discovered and turns your computer into a node of a botnet.
For the foreseeable future, GNOME OS will remain exactly what it is today:
a QA tool
a way to test and iterate over designs
a minimum viable product for downstream projects using GNOME, to compare their own builds with a known-to-be-working one