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.