Gnome is Celebrating it’s 20th Birthday
More than 33 releases since the first release of Gnome.
Gnome was started by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero on August 15, 1997. The primary goal of the project was to create a fully open source alternative of KDE, which was based on Qt widget toolkit that used a non-free licence back then.
Since its initial release in 1999, there have been 33 stable releases of GNOME till date. While Linux caters to power users, developers and sysadmins who prefer CLI, Gnome focuses on ease of use. No wonder Ubuntu, a distribution that targeted PC users picked Gnome as the default desktop environment.
Gnome has made some significant progress in the Linux desktop space with the 3.x family. They have built a distro agnostic software center that allows users of any distro to not only install and update applications, but also update the distribution itself.
Gnome also brought the capability of accessing Google Drive from within Linux desktops, a feature that’s not officially supported by Google.
No wonder that even the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds runs Gnome as his favorite desktop.
Gnome used to be the default desktop environment for Ubuntu, before Canonical introduced its own Unity shell. As a result of that decision, Gnome lost millions of users. But recently, Canonical decided to pull out of desktop space and focus on enterprise. They ditched Unity and went back to Gnome. That means Gnome will return to millions of Ubuntu desktop users.
Happy 20th Birthday, Gnome.
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
Another major organization has decided to test the possibility of migrating from Microsoft's Office 365 to LibreOffice.