Freedesktop.org

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. It was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000. Some of the project's servers are hosted by Portland State University, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Google. 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. 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 joined the X.Org Foundation in 2019. freedesktop.org provides hosting for a number of relevant projects. These include: Software related to windowing systems and graphics in general Cairo, a vector graphics library with cross-device output support Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), Linux API to access the graphics hardware, used by X11, Wayland compositors, Mesa 3D, etc. Glamor, 2D graphics common driver for X server, it supports a variety of graphics chipsets which have supports for OpenGL/EGL/GBM APIs Mesa 3D, an implementation of several graphics API such as Vulkan and OpenGL 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 Poppler, a PDF rendering library Video Acceleration API Wayland, protocol to replace X11; features: no tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker X.Org Server: the official reference implementation of the X11 protocol XCB, an Xlib replacement. Xephyr is a display server D-Bus, a message bus akin to DCOP (KDE 3) and Bonobo (GNOME 2) Elektra, a library for reading and writing configuration FreeType, a text rendering library.