From LQWiki

GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) is a free desktop environment (like KDE) and part of the GNU project. The GNOME project aims for usability and professionalism. Commercial interests in using GNOME for the desktop in business environments, for example, have pushed usability concerns and interests, resulting in a desktop environment which caters to accessibility concerns. Sun Microsystems uses GNOME in their Java Desktop System Linux distribution and have contributed greatly to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Ximian have developed an improved version of Gnome in the guise of Ximian desktop featuring integrated applications such as Evolution and a customized version of OpenOffice.

With a 6 month release cycle the GNOME team has produced one of the slickest and most popular desktop environments around.

Developers are not tied to a single language in developing with GNOME; GNOME applications can be programmed in C, C++, Python, Perl, Java -- even C# -- to produce high-quality applications that integrate smoothly into a Unix or Linux desktop.

The GNOME community consists of a worldwide community of volunteers who hack, translate, design, perform quality assurance, and generally have fun together.

Contents 1 History 2 Criticisms 3 Latest release 4 See also 5 External links

History

The GNOME project started in 1997, a year after the formation of the controversial KDE project. GNOME was formed by Miguel de Icaza in response to the controversy concerning the KDE project choosing the (at the time) un-free Qt GUI widget toolkit. GNOME distances itself from KDE by choosing the toolkit created by and for the GIMP, and doing it all in C. Because GNOME is 100% free software, it gets more commercial attention then KDE.

Criticisms

In recent years, the GNOME project has taken a pounding from a lot of people due to its efforts to "simplify" the desktop for "usability". These efforts usually involve removing various configuration options, as well as trim down the user interfaces and functions of many programs. While these efforts have created software that is initially easy to use, the overall effect removes features and options that advanced/power users would like to have. This has led to many public denouements of GNOME, most notably by Linus Torvalds in 2005. Despite the GNOME project getting a beating, the libraries that its built upon are not suffering from a possible oversimplification, and are used as a basis for lots of professional (as in: not so immediately usable) software, and many of the other desktop environments, most notably XFCE.

Latest release

The latest version of the GNOME desktop environment is GNOME 2.12. You can find out more about it in the GNOME 2.12 release notes.

See also

• Compiling GNOME 2.6
• General Tips - a list of tips for dealing with X (which Gnome runs on top of)
• Java-GNOME
• GNOME Java is the (preferly, transparent) installation of Java in GNOME.
• GNOME_Video_University - GNOME Video University,

External links

• Offical Gnome website (www.gnome.org)
• GNOME's Developer Website (developer.gnome.org)
• GNOME 2.6 Usability Study and Review (www.userinstinct.com)
• GNOME Forum — a large forum hosted by Nabble archiving many GNOME projects' mailing lists for cross browsing and search. Also see Free Desktop Forum.