[KLUG Members] student @: anybody

[Adam Williams]

> What is GNOME to LINUX?

This is hard to answer without knowing your familiarity with any other
system.

Linux is the Operating system,  X provides the display (equivalent to
the GDI if you've done Windows programming),  GNOME provides application
developers a sane way to provide something worth displaying
(applications!).  GNOME provides a widget set called GTK (think MFC in
Windows programming speek), RPC mechanism (think DDE in Windows...), and
a component model (think COM in Windows....).

GNOME is *NOT* "merely" a desktop environment, it is a way to provide
for secure, reliable, extensible, and rapid application development
including the resuse of code via components.

GNOME provides a mechanism where applications can easily provide
interoperability (with other applications), accesibility (for vision
impared people, etc...), and be internationalized (wierd fonts,
right-to-left text, etc....).

GNOME is also built on glib (thats different than glibc), one of the
focuses of which is portability across systsems - so you see GNOME
running on a wide variety of operating systems and hardware platforms.

A distribution of GNOME also typically includes a large collection of
libraries that provide "all" well-written GNOME applications a standard
mechanism for accessing things like databases, various data sources (SMB
volumes, WebDAV volumes, etc...), MIME associations, etc... so that
things can "just work" and application programmers can worry about
things like (!SHOCK!) making good applications.

The end result of GNOME is a desktop environment (or it may be,  I've
used GNOME for things that gurgle along invisible in the back of the
server room).

Please read  de Icaza's "Lets Make UNIX Not Suck" -
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.html
- which is really the Manifesto behind the GNOME community.  Because,
honestly, UNIX does suck.  Windows may suck more, but UNIX certainly
isn't no divine light guiding us to computing nirvana; thats what GNOME
is!