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The GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) project was started in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena as an attempt to provide a free software desktop for the GNU/Linux operating system.
| GNOME screenshot showing Rhythmbox (music), gthumb (image manager), Abiword, and the Nautilus file manager viewing available network shares.
GNOME desktop using the Bengali language |
At the time, the only serious alternative for the non-technical user was KDE. However, there were a number of problems associated with KDE: it was based on Trolltech's Qt toolkitIn computer programming, widget toolkits (or GUI toolkits are sets of basic building elements for graphical user interfaces. They are often implemented as a library, or application framework. See widget (computing) for a list of widgets. Popular Widget To, which had a number of licensing issues regarding alleged violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL). These issues were resolved by the release of Qt under the GPL and also the QPL, an approach known as dual-licensing. There is still considerable disagreement over the use of the full GPL for a library like Qt, and the restrictions this imposes on code linkingA linker or link editor is a program that takes one or more objects generated by compilers and assembles them into a single executable program. In IBM mainframe environments such as OS/360 this program is known as a linkage editor''. On Unix variants the to it, such as the KDE framework and any applications written for it.
The GNOME desktop itself is written in the CThe C Programming Language Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a low-level standardized programming language developed in the early programming language. A number of language bindings are available, allowing GNOME applications to be written in a variety of languages, such as C++C+ (pronounced "sea plus plus") is a general-purpose computer programming language. It is a statically typed free-form multi-paradigm language supporting procedural programming, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and generic programming. Durin, RubyRuby is an object-oriented programming language. It combines syntax inspired by Ada and Perl with Smalltalk-like object oriented features, and also shares some features with Python, Lisp and CLU. It was originally designed as an interpreted language, thou, C#, Python, Perl and many others. In place of Qt, GTK+ was chosen as the basis for GNOME development. Its license is the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It was already used by The GIMP, a major free software project.