GNOME in the context of Freedesktop.org

Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

The right to study and modify a computer program entails that the source code—the preferred format for making changes—be made available to users of that program. While this is often called "access to source code" or "public availability", the Free Software Foundation (FSF) recommends against thinking in those terms, because it might give the impression that users have an obligation (as opposed to a right) to give non-users a copy of the program.

Orca is a free and open-source, flexible, extensible screen reader from the GNOME project for individuals who are blind or visually impaired. Using various combinations of speech synthesis and braille, Orca helps provide access to applications and toolkits that support AT-SPI (e.g., the GNOME desktop, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and GTK, Qt and Java Swing/SWT applications).

The name "Orca", which is another term for a killer whale, is a nod to the long-standing tradition of naming screen readers after aquatic creatures, including the Assistive Technology product on Windows called JAWS (which stands for Job Access With Speech), the early DOS screen reader called Flipper, and the UK vision impairment company Dolphin Computer Access.

A thumbnail is a reduced-size version of a picture or video, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image-organizing programs normally use thumbnails, as do most modern operating systems or desktop environments, such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, KDE (Linux) and GNOME (Linux). On web pages, they also avoid the need to download larger files unnecessarily.

A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is often obtained via a website intended specifically for the purpose. Distros have been designed for a wide variety of systems ranging from personal computers (for example, Linux Mint) to servers (for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and from embedded devices (for example, OpenWrt) to supercomputers (for example, Rocks Cluster Distribution).

A distro typically includes many components in addition to the Linux kernel. Commonly, it includes a package manager, an init system (such as systemd, OpenRC, SysVinit, or runit), GNU tools and libraries, documentation, IP network configuration utilities, the getty TTY setup program, and many more. To provide a desktop experience (most commonly the Mesa userspace graphics drivers) a display server (the most common being the X.org Server, or, more recently, a Wayland compositor such as Sway, KDE's KWin, or GNOME's Mutter), a desktop environment (most commonly GNOME, KDE Plasma, or Xfce), a sound server (usually either PulseAudio or more recently PipeWire), and other related programs may be included or installed by the user.

GNOME Terminal is a terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop environment written by Havoc Pennington and others. Terminal emulators allow users to access a UNIX shell while remaining on their graphical desktop.

GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free open-source widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) targeted at Linux and specifically GNOME (though with some use in other desktop environments). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it.

The GTK team releases new versions on a regular basis. GTK 4 and GTK 3 are actively maintained, while GTK 2 is no longer supported. GTK 1 is independently maintained by the CinePaint project.

D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus")is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, initiated by GNOME developer Havoc Pennington to standardize services provided by Linux desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE Plasma.

The freedesktop.org project also developed a free and open-source software library called libdbus, as a reference implementation of the specification. This library is not D-Bus itself, as other implementations of the D-Bus specification also exist, such as GDBus (GNOME), QtDBus (Qt/KDE), dbus-java and sd-bus (part of systemd).