GNOME Desktop
Justin Hawkins
Fountainhead College of Technology

The GNOME Desktop is a graphical overlay that can be used in conjunction with the Linux operating system. There are other options to use in its place, such as KDE, but most would agree that the GNOME graphical user interphase is the most prevalent. GNOME is a long running project that began in 1997 and continues to be worked on today. The GNOME project was started by Miguel de Icaza in 1997 and progressed when he founded the software company HelixCode with Nat Friedman in 2000 (History, 2011). GNOME has become the standard GUI for Linux with many large companies behind it such as: IBM, HP, Compaq, and others. The reason for the sudden success of the GNOME GUI over its competitors was the fact that it was free software. At the time KDE was the main competition and because of its ties to Qt, it could not be made free. GNOME began out of a need for a free software alternative to Qt. Qt is a development tool that was not free to use and as a result all of the software that was born from it could never be truly “free.” By 1999, GNOME caught on, and was a clear success (Stallman, 2000). When GNOME caught on Qt was released under new licensing that made it a free software. This made KDE another free software alternative, which is the main competition for GNOME today. While GNOME was being created the developers put emphasis on making it an easy to use software. Ease of use and the creation of a free GUI