Review: carbonOS 2022.3, LibreELEC 11.0, Kodi 20.1
In short, carbonOS appears to offer an immutable root filesystem and uses OSTree to handle software management and updates. The project tries to offer a central utility for managing the operating system and offers search functions to assist users in finding things. All of this is provided in a 2.2GB ISO file. So far, carbonOS sounded promising.
I soon discovered carbonOS boots in UEFI mode exclusively, Legacy BIOS mode is not supported. Booting from the live media brings up a menu offering to launch a live session, either running from the removable media or from RAM. Selecting either option immediately fails, causing the screen to briefly go blank and then display the menu again. In short, carbonOS did not boot to a point where I could try using or installing it.
To be fair to the carbonOS developers, they seem to agree the distribution is not yet ready for daily use. The project's download page carries a warning: "Please be aware that this is an early development build of carbonOS. carbonOS is still unfinished. There will be breaking changes." I'm planning to try this interesting project again when it has had more time to mature.