The History of GNOME
A weekly podcast on the history of the GNOME project
Emmanuele Bassi
Show overview
The History of GNOME has published 13 episodes during 2019. That works out to roughly 3 hours of audio in total. Releases follow a near-daily cadence.
Episodes typically run ten to twenty minutes — most land between 12 min and 16 min — and the run-time is fairly consistent across the catalogue. None of the episodes are flagged explicit by the publisher. It is catalogued as a EN-language Technology show.
The catalogue appears to be on hiatus or wound down — the most recent episode landed 7.2 years ago, with no new episodes in over a year. Published by Emmanuele Bassi.
From the publisher
GNOME is made by people, same as history; and just like people, history can be complicated, repeating, funny, sad, and everything in between. This is my attempt at compiling an history of the GNOME project
Latest Episodes
Episode 1.a: The GIMP Toolkit
A side episode! We’re going to take a look to GTK in its first major API cycle
Episode 2.a: Building GNOME
A side episode! Building GNOME is complicated; releasing GNOME is even worse. We’re going to see what tools GNOME developers used to build GNOME 2.
Episode 2.2: Release Day
The GNOME 2 release process meant re-evaluating everything that makes a desktop environment: from its design, to the design of all of its applications, to the release process, to the interaction of settings and preferences.
Episode 2.1: On Brand
A wild GTK major API change appears! It uses better text and icon rendering. It’s super effective! GNOME dons flame retardant pants. It’s not very effective!
Episode 2.0: Retrospective
A retrospective on GNOME 1.x, before we launch into the main narrative of GNOME 2; we’re going to look back at what GNOME 1 did right; what it did wrong; and what it meant in the larger context of the history of the project
Episode 1.c: Applications
A side episode! Early applications in the GNOME 1.x era
Episode 1.b: Bindings
A side episode! Language bindings in the early GNOME era take the front stage
Episode 1.5: End of the road
GNOME 1.4 gets released, and development work for GNOME 2 being in earnest; but things come crashing down once the Dot com bubble bursts, and GNOME loses an ally
Episode 1.4: Founding the Foundation
Exciting times for the GNOME project. The first GUADEC is held in Paris! The Foundation gets founded! Plus: CVS and Bugzilla!
Episode 1.3: Land of the bonobos
New companies form around GNOME! Ximian and Eazel work on making GNOME useful for corporate environments and casual users, and start shaping the technology stack with components for applications to use and reuse.
Episode 1.2: Desktop Wars
The desktop wars begin, and competitions heats up. We’re going to see the initial reaction to KDE’s licensing woes in the larger Linux ecosystem, and how that played into GNOME’s adoption. Plus: Red Hat enters the fray, and creates the Red Hat Advanced Development laboratories, and GNOME releases version 1.0
Episode 1.1: GNOME
The GNOME project is announced! We’re going to see what the Linux world looked like, and why the GNOME project was started; what was available at the time, for Unix and Linux users, and the beginning of complex desktop environments on Linux, ending on the first few months of the project
Prologue
GNOME is made by people, and people make history: complicated, recurring, funny, sad, and everything in between; this is my attempt at compiling an history of the GNOME project to provide a better context not just of past decisions, but also of its future directions