GNOME History

How it all started...

GNOME is special: it was launched specifically with freedom in mind.

In 1997 Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena started the GNOME project. Although there was already a free software desktop called KDE, it was based on the non-free Qt GUI toolkit. A different desktop was needed in order to have a fully free operating system. Miguel and Federico chose to base GNOME on GTK+, a free GUI toolkit available under the terms of the [GNU LGPL](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html). Over the next several months, a complete desktop was developed by a growing community of free software hackers. GNOME's user community was also growing quickly, and in March of 1999, at Linux World Expo in San Jose, California, [GNOME 1.0 was released to the world](http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html). It soon became the desktop of choice for many GNU/Linux users.

Maturity and Focus

GNOME 2.0, [released in June of 2002](http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-June/msg00592.html), represented a leap in technology and a shift in focus. The new GNOME was based on the new and improved GTK+ 2, allowing for better text rendering, internationalization, and full desktop accessibility. More importantly, now that GNOME was an established free desktop, the community could focus on providing an unparalleled user experience. In GNOME 2.0, user interfaces were redesigned according to the [GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG)](http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/). Usability, accessibility, internationalization, and high quality remain central themes of GNOME development to this day.

The Qt GUI toolkit was eventually released as free software, allowing KDE to provide a fully free desktop as well. GNOME, KDE, and other projects collaborate on common parts of the desktop, designing and following many standards and specifications from organizations like [freedesktop.org](http://www.freedesktop.org). Thanks to these efforts, users can choose different free desktops with different focuses and feature sets without worrying about interoperability issues.

Always Improving

GNOME's history is still being written. We work to bring the [free](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) desktop to users of every background (technical level, language, physical abilities). GNOME is people, and you can be a part of our history.

Easy to learn, honest, reliable, widespread, and growing: Why not join our community and download GNOME now?

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