Freedesktop.org

freedesktop.org
Type of site
Software development management system
Available inEnglish
Created byHavoc Pennington
URLfreedesktop.org
CommercialNo
LaunchedMarch 2000 (2000-03)
Current statusOnline

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.

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 the project's servers are hosted by Portland State University.