freedesktop.org ( fd.o ), formerly X Desktop Group ( XDG ), is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems . Although freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, it is not a formal standards body.
5-480: The project was founded by Havoc Pennington , a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000. Widely used open-source X-based desktop projects, such as GNOME, KDE's Plasma Desktop , and Xfce , are collaborating with the freedesktop.org project. In 2006, the project released Portland 1.0 (xdg-utils), a set of common interfaces for desktop environments. freedesktop.org joined the X.Org Foundation in 2019. Some of
10-461: Is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur. He is known in the free software movement due to his work on HAL , GNOME , Metacity , GConf , and D-Bus . Havoc Pennington graduated from the University of Chicago in 1998. After graduation, he worked at Red Hat as a Desktop manager/engineer for nine years, ending in 2008. He also founded the project freedesktop.org in 2000. He promoted
15-666: The idea of the Gnome Online Desktop in 2007. For a time, he led the development of the 2006–2009 Mugshot project. From 2008 until June 2011, he worked on a consumer product for the startup company Litl (hardware, and proprietary software and services). From 2011 to 2015 he worked for Typesafe (now Lightbend ). In 2017 he cofounded Tidelift, which seeks to improve the ecosystem around open source software by providing support for professional teams using open source and helping maintainers build sustainable businesses around their projects. This biographical article relating to
20-547: The project's servers are hosted by Portland State University . freedesktop.org provides hosting for a number of relevant projects. These include: Software related to windowing systems and graphics in general Also, Avahi (a free Zeroconf implementation) started as a fd.o project but has since become a separate project. XDG Base Directory Specification (XDG BDS) introduces a range of variables where user-specific files used by programs should be found. Many tools and applications utilize these variables by default. Besides
25-479: The variables mentioned below, XDG BDS also specifies that users' local binary files may be installed into $ HOME/.local/bin . Systems compliant with the spec are expected to make this directory available in their CLI 's PATH environment variable. The project aims to catch interoperability issues much earlier in the process. It is not for legislating formal standards. Stated goals include: Havoc Pennington Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington (born c. 1976)
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