What is GNOME?

GNOME is the GUI desktop of the GNU Project.

To quote from the original announcement from comp.os.linux.announce, GNOME is intended to be "a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software."

I, your lowly FAQ maintainer, like to explain GNOME as everything that's expected in a modern programming environment. In this respect, it is approximately equivalent to CDE, Win32, NextStep, or KDE. The big difference is that, unlike any of the above-mentioned examples, every single component of GNOME is Free Software.

For the project geographers out there, here are some of the higher mountains to be found in GNOME-land:

If all of this seems ambitious, that's because it is! Read on to find out more!