So, why GNOME?
Having seen some of the new features in GNOME 2.2, why choose GNOME over other desktop environments? Every GNOME volunteer has their own motivations, of course, but here are some of the common reasons many of us choose to work on GNOME.
- 7.1. Usability.
- 7.2. Accessibility.
- 7.3. Improved performance
- 7.4. Interface Stability
- 7.5. Mature applications.
- 7.6. Licensing.
- 7.7. Support.
7.1. Usability.
GNOME is one of the few open source projects to take a stand for ease of use and UI consistency over geeky hyper-configurability. Our Human Interface Guidelines, developed by a team of UI professionals and GNOME volunteers, and released before GNOME 2.2, are the most complete Free Software usability guidelines yet. We believe that this focus on usability will produce a user environment that "just works" and as a result lets GNOME users- both experienced and inexperienced- focus on the task at hand instead of on their applications.

7.2. Accessibility.
Beyond making GNOME easier to use for the average computer user, GNOME has also taken the lead in making the unix desktop accessible to those with disabilities. GNOME's accessibility technologies allow (for example) the use of braille readers, voice synthesizers, and pointing devices. This has nice side effects for other users, as well- for example, all of GNOME should now be keyboard navigable, and many GNOME interfaces have more informative tooltips. Many governments, including the US government, require comprehensive accessibility support in software they purchase. After dozens of person-years of effort, GNOME is the only free software desktop to address this issue.
7.3. Improved performance
GNOME 2.0 and 2.2 are smaller and faster than previous versions of GNOME, a welcome trend. The file manager in particular continues to improve, as it now uses faster techniques for rendering and icon creation.
7.4. Interface Stability
The key libraries in the GNOME Development Platform carry guarantees of API and ABI stability. This means that 'porting' an application from GNOME 2.0 to GNOME 2.2 (or to GNOME 2.4) should involve exactly nothing, if a developer does not wish to take advantage of new functionality in the libraries.
7.5. Mature applications.
Popular and robust applications such as Mozilla, Galeon, Evolution, Gnumeric, Abiword, GAIM, X-Chat, and more are based on GNOME or GTK+. These applications are among the most powerful and capable in the Free Software world, and we expect that they'll only get better as they take more advantage of the GNOME development environment.
7.6. Licensing.
All GNOME libraries are licensed under the LGPL, so developing for the GNOME platform is 100% free of license fees, both for developers of Free and proprietary software.
7.7. Support.
Active contributors to GNOME 2.2 development include Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Ximian, and Mandrake, all established experts who can help with your enterprise UNIX or Linux deployment.