GNOME

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GNOME or Gnome (formerly said to stand for "GNU Network Object Model Environment"—a now obsolete designation) is a popular desktop environment for UNIX. Gnome, along with KDE and Xfce is one of the "big three" UNIX desktops.

GNOME was originally developed because of silly political reasons relating to how the Free Software Foundation, a pressure group, viewed the decision of the KDE developers to use the Qt toolkit, which was not open source software at that time. GNOME used the open-source GTK+ toolkit instead.

GNOME has since developed into a valid project with differing design goals to KDE. GNOME has also received a large boost in popularity due to being selected as the default desktop environment of Ubuntu a popular desktop-oriented Linux environment.

GNOME has also gained traction because of severe engineering difficulties afflicting KDE. KDE and the Qt toolkit have recently undergone separate major rewrites and, although the KDE developers have a clear vision it is entirely unclear if that vision can be executed at the moment.

Pronunciation note

Nota Bené! GNOME is pronounced ɠ-noːm (guh-nome) not noːm as in the lawn ornament. This is because GNU is pronounced ɠ-nuː to avoid confusion with "new"

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