GNOME

Last reviewed on 2026-05-13 Reference
In short
  • GNOME is one of the two most-used Linux desktop environments, alongside KDE Plasma.
  • It is governed by the GNOME Foundation and developed by a large international community of contributors.
  • Major releases come out roughly twice a year, on a March/September cadence; point releases follow.
  • GNOME is the default desktop on Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL and several other major distributions.

About the project

The GNOME Project was founded in 1997 with two main goals: to provide a fully free desktop environment on Linux and to do so on top of an open toolkit. The result is two intertwined things: GNOME the desktop environment (a window manager, shell, file manager, settings application and core applications) and the GNOME platform (the GTK toolkit, GLib, GObject and the libraries and services that GNOME applications use).

The project is administered by the GNOME Foundation, a non-profit organisation that owns the GNOME trademark and coordinates infrastructure, hosting, conferences (GUADEC) and outreach. Development happens openly in the project's GitLab instance at gitlab.gnome.org.

Design philosophy

GNOME has a distinctive design philosophy: prioritise a small number of well-judged defaults over breadth of configuration, and trust users to discover the functionality they need rather than expose every option in a settings panel. This makes the out-of-box experience consistent and predictable; it also means that some users prefer KDE Plasma or Xfce, which are designed around the opposite priority.

The user-facing design has been refined repeatedly over the years. The most significant recent shift was the move to GNOME 40 and afterwards, which restructured the Activities overview around horizontal workspaces and consolidated the previously scattered settings into a single Settings application.

Release cadence

GNOME releases on a six-month cadence, with major versions historically appearing around March and September. The release process is well documented, freezes are observed strictly, and point releases (GNOME 47.1, 47.2 and so on) follow during the support window with bug and security fixes.

Versions are simple integers (45, 46, 47). Each release builds on the previous one rather than redesigning from scratch, but accumulated changes over several releases can be substantial.

Components

"GNOME" is typically used to refer to the integrated desktop, but it's helpful to understand its components separately:

GNOME Shell

The interactive shell — the bar at the top of the screen, the Activities overview, the workspace switcher and the lock screen. Extensions can modify or extend it.

Mutter

The window manager and compositor that GNOME Shell runs on top of. Mutter handles window placement, animations and (on modern systems) the Wayland display server.

GTK

The widget toolkit used by GNOME applications and a huge number of independent applications. GTK 4 is the current major version.

libadwaita

The set of widgets, styles and design patterns that give GNOME applications their distinctive look. Built on GTK 4.

GNOME Core Applications

Files (Nautilus), Settings, Software, Calendar, Maps, Web (Epiphany), Photos and a number of other applications maintained alongside the desktop.

GLib / GObject

The underlying object system, event loop and data structures that GNOME components are built on. Used well beyond GNOME itself.

Where GNOME ships by default

GNOME is the default desktop environment on a number of major distributions:

  • Fedora Workstation
  • Ubuntu Desktop (with Canonical-specific customisations)
  • Debian (when GNOME is selected at install time, which is the default)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its rebuilds
  • openSUSE (alongside KDE Plasma as a co-equal option)
  • Pop!_OS (with substantial System76 customisations and additions)

Extensions

GNOME Shell can be extended through JavaScript extensions installed from the GNOME Extensions site or from a distribution-provided extensions package. Extensions are powerful — they can modify the panel, add system indicators, change workspace behaviour and integrate external services — but they are tied to a specific GNOME version, and many extensions take time to be updated after a major release.

If you depend on a particular set of extensions, that's a reason to use a distribution that doesn't move quickly through GNOME versions, or to wait a few weeks after a release before upgrading.

GNOME on Wayland

GNOME has been default-Wayland on most distributions for years. The legacy X11 session still ships on some distributions, but new development is focused on Wayland and a number of features (notably HDR support and high-DPI improvements) are landing on Wayland first. For most users, the Wayland session is now the better choice. If you're choosing between sessions at the login screen, the Wayland vs X11 reference covers the practical trade-offs.

Following the project

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