freedesktop.org
More info
- Founded
- Founder
- Havoc Pennington
- Type
- Collaboration project
- Website
- freedesktop.org
The meeting place that in 2000 set out to make GNOME and KDE work on the same screen, and became the home of X.Org, Wayland, D-Bus and most of the Linux desktop's plumbing.
Havoc Pennington at Red Hat started the X Desktop Group in March 2000 with a narrow problem: GNOME and KDE each had their own way of reading .desktop files, dragging and dropping, showing a system tray and talking to the window manager, and anyone running programs from both could tell. The group was explicitly not to be a standards body — its specifications are pointedly not called standards — but a place where the projects could agree. The abbreviation XDG stayed behind in the environment variables when the name became freedesktop.org.
The specifications came first: Desktop Entry, Base Directory, icon themes, menus, the MIME database, EWMH, XSETTINGS and XEmbed. Then came the code. When the X.Org Foundation needed a home for its XFree86 fork in 2004 it landed here, followed by D-Bus, HAL, PulseAudio, Mesa, Wayland, PipeWire and, for a few years, systemd. The site is now in effect the infrastructure of the Linux graphics stack, run on its own GitLab instance, and still without ever having become an organisation with bylaws.