A project to promote and improve software for the Linux Desktop, only using Free software.

It includes many initiatives:

Some of them designed to improve inter-operability between the GNOME and KDE projects, such as a shared ".desktop" file format for menu entries and shortcuts, and the "D-BUS" message-passing system, designed to be a next-generation replacement for KDE's DCOP and GNOME's CORBA interfaces.

A modern XServer, currently based on XFree86 code. (http://freedesktop.org/Software/xserver). Some of the core XFree86 developers, fed up with the slow pace of development, created this fork.

See http://freedesktop.org for other things under active development.