freedesktop.org is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software desktop environments for the X Window System and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-likeoperating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat in March 2000. The project's servers are hosted by Portland State University, which in turn are sponsored by HP, Intel and Google. Widely used open-source X-based desktop projects such as GNOME, KDE, and Xfce—are collaborating with the freedesktop.org project. In 2006, the project released Portland 1.0, a set of common interfaces for desktop environments. However, freedesktop.org is a "collaboration zone" for standards and specifications where users can freely discuss ideas, and not a formal standards organization. freedesktop.org was formerly known as the X Desktop Group, and the abbreviation "XDG" remains common in their work. According to an October 2018 article published by Phoronix, freedesktop.org will be officially joining the X.Org Foundation.
Hosted projects
freedesktop.org provides hosting for a number of relevant projects. These include:
Pixman, is a low-level software library for pixel manipulation, providing features such as image compositing and trapezoid rasterization. Important users of pixman are the cairo graphics library and the X.Org Server
GTK-Qt engine, a GTK+ 2 engine which uses Qt to draw the graphical control elements, providing the same look and feel of KDE applications to GTK+2 applications.
HAL is a consistent cross-operating system layer; it has been deprecated and replaced by udev.
libinput, a library to handle input devices in Wayland compositors and to provide a generic X.Org input driver. It provides device detection, device handling, input deviceevent processing and abstraction to minimize the amount of custom input code compositors need to provide the common set of functionality that users expect
PulseAudio is a sound server frontend meant to provide software mixing, network audio, and per application volume control.
systemd is a comprehensive init framework to start and manage services and sessions meant to replace older init models.
Xft, anti-aliased fonts using the FreeType library, rather than the old X core fonts.
Also, Avahi started as a fd.o project but has now moved elsewhere.
Stated aims
The project aims to catch interoperability issues much earlier in the process. It is not for legislating formal standards.
Collect existing specifications, standards and documents related to X desktop interoperability and make them available in a central location;
Promote the development of new specifications and standards to be shared among multiple X desktops;
Integrate desktop-specific standards into broader standards efforts, such as Linux Standard Base and the ICCCM;
Work on the implementation of these standards in specific X desktops;
Serve as a neutral forum for sharing ideas about X desktop technology;
Implement technologies that further X desktop interoperability and free X desktops in general;
Promote X desktops and X desktop standards to application authors, both commercial and volunteer;
Communicate with the developers of free operating system kernels, the X Window System itself, free OS distributions, and so on to address desktop-related problems;
Provide source repositories, and CVS web hosting, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and other resources to free software projects that work toward the above goals.
