KDE

KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the University of Tübingen. He found a number of things wrong with the UNIX desktop at that time. He proposed the formation of not only a set of applications, but rather a desktop environment, in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use. That post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born. Today thousands of people use KDE as their desktop environment as a rich, flexible alternative to proprietary desktop software.

 

Gnome

In 1997, the GNOME project was founded by Miguel de Icaza with the aim of being an entirely free desktop. This means free from all license agreement, including the GNU/GPL, and free from cost. The project was so successful that The GNOME Foundation was announced in August 2000 at the GNU/Linux World Expo in San Jose California. Since then various companies have joined together to continue the development of the GNOME user environment and GNOME-based technologies.

Today, although slightly less popular than KDE, Gnome maintains a user base of thousands as well, and now enjoyed widespread acceptance and support from major GNU/Linux companies such as Red Hat and Novell.

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