Founded | August 1997 |
---|---|
Founder | Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena [1] |
Type | Community |
Focus | Open source |
Products | GNOME, GTK, GLib, and others |
Method | Development and documentation |
Website | gnome |
GNOME Project is a community behind the GNOME desktop environment and the software platform upon which it is based. It consists of all the software developers, artists, writers, translators, other contributors, and active users of GNOME. It is no longer part of the GNU Project. [2] [3]
In August 2000, the GNOME Foundation was set up to deal with administrative tasks and press interest, and to act as a contact point for companies interested in developing GNOME software. While not directly involved in technical decisions, the Foundation does coordinate releases and decide which projects will be part of GNOME. Membership is open to anyone who has made a non-trivial contribution to the project. [4] Members of the Foundation elect a board of directors every November, and candidates for the positions must be members themselves.
The GNOME Project holds several community programs and events, usually tailored to local users and developers. The main gathering of GNOME contributors is the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC), an annual conference used to discuss the development and progress of GNOME. [5] The idea of GUADEC events is attributed to the GNOME developers' and users' Paris meeting of 1998. [6] An annual Asian conference called GNOME.Asia also exists. [7] GNOME also participated in the Desktop Summit, which is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities that was held in Europe in 2009 and 2011. [8]
Among the project's community programs is Outreachy, established with the goals of increasing women participation and improving the resources available to all newcomers for getting involved in GNOME. [9]
GNOME Project is involved in development of a range of notable software, including: [10]
The GNOME Project actively collaborates with other free software projects. Previous collaboration efforts were ordinarily organized on project-to-project basis. [11] To make the collaboration broader, the freedesktop.org project was founded.
The project focuses on: [12]
KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, and a range of applications such as Kate, digiKam, and Krita. Some KDE applications are cross-platform and can run on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, Microsoft Windows, and Android.
The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project.
In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until the rise of mobile computing. Desktop GUIs help the user to easily access and edit files, while they usually do not provide access to all of the features found in the underlying operating system. Instead, the traditional command-line interface (CLI) is still used when full control over the operating system is required.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
freedesktop.org (fd.o), formerly X Desktop Group (XDG), is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Although freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, it is not a formal standards body.
GUADEC, formerly the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, is an annual developer conference whose prime topic is the development of the GNOME desktop environment and its underlying base software such as GTK, GStreamer, etc.
GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software-defined radios and signal processing systems. It can be used with external radio frequency (RF) hardware to create software-defined radios, or without hardware in a simulation-like environment. It is widely used in hobbyist, academic, and commercial environments to support both wireless communications research and real-world radio systems.
The Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) is a testing tool that uses computer assistive technology to automate graphical user interface (GUI) testing. The GUI functionality of an application can be tested in Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, and embedded system environments. The macOS version is named PyATOM, and the Windows version is Cobra. The LDTP is released as free and open-source software under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
openSUSE is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: Tumbleweed, an upstream rolling release distribution, and Leap, a stable release distribution which is sourced from SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Linux is a generic name for a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project.
GNOME 3 is the third major release of the GNOME desktop environment. A major departure from technologies implemented by its predecessors, GNOME 3 introduced a dramatically different user interface. It was the first GNOME release to utilize a unified graphical shell known as GNOME Shell. It also introduced support for the Wayland display protocol and added integration with other key technologies such as Flatpak during its development lifecycle.
GTK is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the Wayland and X11 windowing systems.
GNOME, originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10 and was used until Ubuntu 17.10. Since 2017, its development was taken over by the Unity7 Maintainers (Unity7) and UBports.
Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software. Based in A Coruña, Galicia (Spain), Igalia is known for its contributions and commitments to both open-source and open standards. Igalia's primary focus is on open source solutions for a large set of hardware and software platforms centering on browsers, graphics, multimedia, compilers, virtualization, embedded Linux, and device drivers.
MATE is a desktop environment composed of free and open-source software that runs on Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems such as BSD, and illumos operating systems.
Mir is a computer display server and, recently, a Wayland compositor for the Linux operating system that is under development by Canonical Ltd. It was planned to replace the currently used X Window System for Ubuntu; however, the plan changed and Mutter was adopted as part of GNOME Shell.
GTK Scene Graph Kit (GSK) is the rendering and scene graph API for GTK introduced with version 3.90. GSK lies between the graphical control elements (widgets) and the rendering.
GNOME 1 is the first major release of the GNOME desktop environment. Its primary goal was to provide a consistent user-friendly environment in conjunction with the X Window System. It was also a modern and free and open source software alternative to older desktop environments such as the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), but also to the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Each desktop environment was built-upon then proprietary-licensed widget toolkits, whereas GNOME's goal from the onset, was to be freely-licensed, and utilize the GTK toolkit instead.