First stable release of GNOME was released in 1999

Aug 15, 2017 09:42 GMT  ·  By

Believe it or not, today's GNOME birthday, and not any birthday, as the popular desktop environment designed for GNU/Linux distributions celebrates 20 years of existence.

That's right, 20 years ago on this day (August 15, 1997), the GNOME Project was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero as the two wanted to create an alternative desktop environment to KDE and other similar projects.

However, it took them two years to release the first stable version, GNOME 1.0, in 1999. Since then, the GNOME Project was very active and launched no less than 33 stable releases, the latest one being GNOME 3.24 "Portland."

GNOME 3.24 has already been adopted by numerous popular GNU/Linux distros, including OpenSuSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu, despite its release earlier this year on March 22, but work on the GNOME desktop never stops.

That's why we're now looking forward to the next major release of the desktop environment, GNOME 3.26 "Manchester," which just entered Beta stages of development and it's expected to launch next month, on September 13, 2017.

Until then, it's party time, and the team behind the GNOME Project invites all GNOME fans and the Open Source community to celebrate the 20th anniversary of GNOME either by starting your own party or join an existing one.

"Celebrate Twenty Years Strong with the GNOME Foundation: visit the 20th Birthday Party page to find a party — or even start your own," said the devs. "You can also support GNOME by making a donation or becoming a Friend of GNOME."

On this occasion, we want to wish GNOME Project happy anniversary, and we can't wait to see what they have in store for the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment, which will be used by default on Ubuntu 17.10 and Fedora 27.

GNOME (3 Images)

Happy 20th Birthday, GNOME!
GNOME 3 desktopGNOME 3 desktop in overview mode
Open gallery