OpenDesktop.org

Last updated
Opendesktop.org
OpenDesktop.org Logo As Of 2023.png
Screenshot of OpenDesktop.org on December 17, 2023.png
Opendesktop.org homepage
Type of site
Libre services and content sharing
OwnerHive01 GmbH
Created by Frank Karlitschek
URL https://www.opendesktop.org/
CommercialNo (AGPL released server-code)
RegistrationOptional
Launched2001
Current statusUnder maintenance

Opendesktop.org is a website portal offering personal cloud services such as storage and communication services, as well as public services in form of a store for libre (open source/creative commons) content publishing and a code hosting site for open development.

Contents

Features

Main Site

The goal of OpenDesktop.org is the advancement of free software and libre computing technologies via hosting free-as-in-freedom-and-beer services for the community.

Opendesktop.org Personal Services

As of 2019, Opendesktop offers many free alternatives to proprietary services, like file sharing, contact and calendar management, chat, and messaging. All of these services are based on free or libre software components, like Nextcloud, Discourse, or Element (a Matrix client).

Pling.com

A major part of OpenDesktop.org's services is pling.com. It is a website used for sharing user generated content. It allows the publishing of any kind of libre content such as themes, wallpapers, software applications, and add-ons, as well as other creative content like audio, videos, or comics, provided the content is released under liberal licensing terms like the GPL or Creative Commons. This content can then be downloaded or directly installed without registration or any other limitation or cost. Registered users can upvote or downvote content, add comments, and upload new content such as applications, themes, add-ons or other forms of content. Community members can also decide to sponsor certain content with a monthly donation. Opendesktop.org's Pling is one of the largest online communities for making such content available, serving as the platform for the official KDE Store [1] for KDE themes, widgets, and other customization-related items. Other sites for various Linux desktops are organized in sub-groups such as Gnome-Look.org, Xfce-Look.org, and others.

Supporting via Donations

Social Desktop logo Socialdesktopologo.jpeg
Social Desktop logo

The social community aspect of the portal has been a driving factor early on. According to the project site, a dedicated community is a key factor to improve the quality of open source and to ultimately grow the adoption of the Linux desktop. One primary goal for Pling is to encourage free software users to support the various subgroups and creators on the platform via donations.

OCS API

Pling.com uses the Open Collaboration Services API, shortened as the OCS API, which is a certified standard protocol of freedesktop.org. [2] KDE SC 4 was the first project to make use of the OCS API. KDE Plasma 5 and various KDE applications use the OCS API via the KNewStuff framework. [3]

Opencode.net

Opencode.net is a part of the services offered by Opendesktop.org, providing software development and hosting services. It is based on GitLab, with the possibility to build binaries via CI and integrate any project with Opendesktop's publishing service, Pling.com.

Growth and statistics

In the beginning of December 2001, 2,000 users were registered on the various websites. About 0.8 million page impressions per month were made. A year later, in 2002, there were 6,000 registered users and 3 million page impressions each month. Heavy growth for more than 8 years lead to more than 130,000 registered users from over 100 countries in 2009. Over 90 million page impressions per month are reached with more than 6 terabytes of internet traffic per month. [4] Around 2.5 million people visit Opendesktop.org every month.

History

The first website of the portal, KDE-Look.org, was started in the year 2001 by Frank Karlitschek. [5] Shortly after, many similar sites with focus on other open source themes and customization for other Linux desktops, such as GNOME, were launched. In 2007, Opendesktop.org got established as an umbrella page for the whole network that contains the sites such as Xfce-Look.org, GNOME-Look.org or Linux-Apps.com. [6] [ dead link ] These services now continue on their own dedicated page, along with the content also being available on pling.com.
In January 2016, Frank Karlitschek sold Hive01 GmbH to Blue Systems GmbH. [7]

Related Research Articles

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xfce</span> Desktop environment

Xfce or XFCE is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNOME Files</span> File manager

GNOME Files, formerly and internally known as Nautilus, is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. Nautilus was originally developed by Eazel with many luminaries from the tech world including Andy Hertzfeld (Apple), chief architect for Nautilus. The name "Nautilus" was a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent an operating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 (2001) and has been the default file manager from version 2.0 onwards.

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.

D-Bus is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, initiated by GNOME developer Havoc Pennington to standardize services provided by Linux desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KDE Software Compilation 4</span> Software

KDE Software Compilation 4 was the only series of the so-called KDE Software Compilation, first released in January 2008 and the last release being 4.14.3 released in November 2014. It was the follow-up to K Desktop Environment 3. Following KDE SC 4, the compilation was broken up into basic framework libraries, desktop environment and applications, which are termed KDE Frameworks 5, KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications, respectively.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NetworkManager</span> Software

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tango Desktop Project</span> Open source initiative

The Tango Desktop Project was an open-source initiative to create a set of design guidelines and to provide a consistent user experience for applications on desktop environments. The project created a set of icons known as the Tango Icon Library and that were described as a "proof of concept". The Tango Desktop Project was a project of freedesktop.org, and was closely linked with other freedesktop.org guidelines, such as the Standard Icon Theming Specification.

The Portland Project is an initiative by freedesktop.org aiming at easing the portability of application software between desktop environments and kernels by designing cross-platform APIs and offering implementations thereof as libraries to independent software vendors (ISVs).

A desktop environment is a collection of software designed to give functionality and a certain look and feel to an operating system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Granular Linux</span> Linux distribution

Granular, or Granular Linux, is a Linux distribution targeted at the common desktop users. Granular is based on PCLinuxOS and comes as an installable live CD. The CD version of Granular features two desktop environments – KDE and a development version of Enlightenment. Where KDE is a full-featured desktop environment, Enlightenment is a lightweight desktop shell which is markedly faster than KDE.

The Open Collaboration Services (OCS) is an open and vendor-independent REST-based API for integration of web communities and web-based services into desktop and mobile applications. It allows the exchange of relevant data from a social network between the site and clients such as other websites and applications or widgets running locally on the user's machine or mobile device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Karlitschek</span>

Frank Karlitschek is a German open source software developer living in Stuttgart, Germany.

Fedora Linux is a popular Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora attempts to maintain a six-month release schedule, offering new versions in May and November, although some releases have experienced minor delays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MATE (desktop environment)</span> Desktop environment forked from GNOME 2

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.

Blue Systems is a German IT company. It is most prominent as a major KDE supporter and previous driving force behind Kubuntu with a number of KDE developers working for Blue Systems. According to Blue Systems employee Aurélien Gâteau, "Blue Systems does not have a business model, at least for now".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manjaro</span> Linux distribution based on Arch Linux with rolling releases

Manjaro is a free and open-source Linux distribution based on the Arch Linux operating system that has a focus on user-friendliness and accessibility. It uses a rolling release update model and Pacman as its package manager. It is developed mainly in Austria, France and Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antergos</span> Discontinued Linux distribution based on Arch Linux

Antergos is a discontinued Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. By default, it includes the GNOME desktop environment, but it also offers options for Cinnamon, MATE, KDE Plasma 5, Deepin, and Xfce desktops. Originally released in July 2012 as Cinnarch, it quickly gained popularity and was ranked among the top 40 most popular distributions on DistroWatch by June 2013. The name Antergos derived from the Galician word for ancestors, was chosen to "to link the past with the present".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UPower</span> Linux power management middleware

UPower is a piece of middleware for power management on Linux systems. It enumerates power sources, maintains statistics and history data on them and notifies about status changes. It consists of a daemon (upowerd), an application programming interface and a set of command line tools. The daemon provides its functionality to applications over the system bus. PolicyKit restricts access to the UPower functionality for initiating hibernate mode or shutting down the operating system (freedesktop.upower.policy). The command-line client program upower can be used to query and monitor information about the power supply devices in the system. Graphical user interfaces to the functionality of UPower include the GNOME Power Manager and the Xfce Power Manager.

References

  1. ↑ Nestor, Marius (2016-09-04). "KDE Software Store to Soon Offer Downloads in Snap, Flatpak and AppImage Formats". Softpedia.
  2. ↑ Karlitschek, Frank (2013-05-17). "Open Collaboration Services v1.6". freedesktop.org.
  3. ↑ "KNewStuff". api.kde.org.
  4. ↑ Karlitschek, Frank (2008-12-03). "openDesktop.org rocks with 200,000 downloads per day". hive01.com. Archived from the original on 2016-12-20.
  5. ↑ Karlitschek, Frank. "Who we are". hive01.com. Archived from the original on 2009-02-25.
  6. ↑ "Announcement of the openDesktop.org head website". hive01.com.
  7. ↑ Larabel, Michael (2016-01-13). "OpenDesktop.org Acquired By KDE-Loving Blue Systems". Phoronix.
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