GNOME and KDE team up on the Linux desktop

The Linux desktop has been around for decades, but it has never been the darling of the mass market. To some extent, as Linus Torvalds said, “fragmentation of the different vendors have held the desktop back.”. But now, the two major Linux desktop competitors,  GNOME Foundation and KDE,  have agreed to work together, which is an important step forward.

GNOME and KDE will co-sponsor the 2019 Linux App Summit (LAS) 2019 (LAS) in Barcelona from November 12th to 15th. This is not the first time that two competitors have come together, but it has been ten years since they united to hold a conference. Both organizations are eager to bring their communities together to create an application ecosystem that goes beyond individual distributions and opens up markets for everyone.

Neil McGovern, executive director of GNOME, said:

“LAS represents one of many steps towards a thriving desktop ecosystem. By partnering with KDE we show the desire  to build the kind of application ecosystem that demonstrates that Open Source and Free Software are important; the technology and organization we build to achieve this is valuable and necessary.”

Aleix Pol Gonzalez, vice president of KDE EV, said:

“Over the years we have built great solutions that millions of people use around the world. It’s been when we have worked together that we have managed to become bigger than the sum of the parts. Together with GNOME, counting with the collaboration of many distributions and application developers, we’ll have the opportunity to work side by side, share our perspectives and offer the platform that the next generation of solutions will be built on.”

Source: ZDNet