A dedicated community of volunteers and years of development have made GNOME a valuable choice for home users, companies, and public authorities:
GNOME's community of professional and volunteer usability experts have created Free Software's first and only Human Interface Guidelines, and all core GNOME software is adopting these principles.
Using GNOME requires minimal training, and is easy to support, administer, and install; cutting IT costs for rollout and maintenance. Easy to use also means easy to support: remote system administration cuts down on time spent pacing hallways and waiting in elevators.
In addition, extensive manuals and help systems mean you're never without resources.
GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project. Its development is open and transparent. An established peer-review process makes GNOME as secure as possible. No spyware or adware is included in GNOME.
GNOME's licensing policy also means that you don't have to pay licensing fees or spend money keeping track of licenses, and you can build in-house software royalty-free, even if you choose not to release the source.
GNOME releases are defined by the GNOME Release Team and are scheduled to occur every six months. Strict policies for the stability of our programming libraries ensure that GNOME software is granted to work after new GNOME releases.
As an organized community, with a foundation of several hundred members, with teams for usability, accessibility, and quality assurence, and with an elected board, GNOME is a reliable partner for your desktop and development needs.
GNOME is available in your language. Many large software companies do not produce translations for smaller languages, but GNOME makes it easy for dozens of languages both large and small, including Azerbaijani, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swedish.
If you have limited mobility or vision, then you'll be glad to hear that GNOME is serious about accessible software. GNOME works with screen readers, braille keyboards, and screen magnifiers, and meets accessibility requirements for many governments worldwide, including the US Department of Defense.
Already today, GNOME is the desktop of choice for industry leaders like IBM, HP, and Sun. Governments in places as diverse as Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the US, Extremadura, Spain, and Beijing, China, have selected GNOME for their desktops. With a large number of users, and a wide range of vendors, you can be assured of availability and support for a long time to come.
GNOME has all the software you need every day: games, browser, email, office suite, and more. In addition, excellent Windows file compatibility means you can work with files that Windows users send you.
A growing number of developers choose GNOME because the GNOME object system is easy to bind to other languages, so they can choose from a dozen popular development languages like Java, C#, Python, Perl, and of course C and C++.
GNOME is dedicated to giving users and developers the ultimate level of control over their desktops, their software, and their data: You are allowed to download the source code, change it, share it legally with your friends and build a community around it.
Most GNOME libraries are available under the terms of the LGPL, which means you can develop GNOME software free of charge, no matter what license you use for your finished product.
Want to learn more? Take the tour. Or just download GNOME now.