Vlogcanic

The KDE proyect was born to provide a free desktop environment but it was built upon the Qt toolkit which wasn’t free at the time. That didn’t sit well with Debian’s interpretation of what free software is according to the GPL nor with the aspirations of the GNU project so Debian excluded KDE from Debian GNU/Linux and the GNU project launched another project to develop a new graphical desktop environment completely based on free software, the GNU Network Model Environment — GNOME — which got started in 1997 under the leadership of two mexican developers, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena.

Currently, Gnome’s objectives (the capitalization has been dropped as it no longer suits Gnome’s activities) are the development of the Gnome desktop environment and the Gnome platform, a full infrastructure for building applications that integrate into the desktop environment.

The project puts a good deal of emphasis into simplicity and usability (things should just work), freedom in software, accessibility, internationalization, making it easy to develop new apps, project organization and support from other projects and institutions.

It was conceived as a Linux thing, but it’s now available for other Unix-like operating systems such as BSD and Solaris and it’s still strong in the Linux comunity, being the desktop of choice for many distros like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and many others.

Controversial simplicity.

Gome’s espousal of a simple desktop is not always as welcome among Linux users as one might think. While it remains a fully featured desktop environment, Gnome’s user confgurable options have dropped significantly over time and that is something akin to a loss in versatility to some users.

On the other hand that very same simplicity can be one of the reasons for which Ubuntu has exploded this last few years, leading the current growth in the Linux new user community –for new users, the overwhelming variety in options found in other desktops can be confusing.

Recent developments.

Gnome is now a part of the freedesktop.org proyect, which aims to facilitate the interoperability between different X Window graphical environments (Gnome, KDE, Xfce) in such a way that the apps written for one of said desktops can integrate well into the other ones.

Freedesktop induces a bit of skepticisim because of the seemingly contradictory goals it espouses (cooperation and competition… at the same time) and yet there is a number of freedesktop technolgies already in Gnome’s core, so to speak, such as Gstreamer, Tango and many others.