Freedesktop.org

thumb|Preferred badge for promoting apps on Flathub since 2023, English version Flatpak is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It provides a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in (partial) isolation from the rest of the system. Flatpak was known as xdg-app until 2016.

the X.Org Foundation's display server for the X Window System

window manager for Unix-like operating systems

systemd is a software suite for system and service management on Linux built to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its main component is an init system used to bootstrap user space and manage user processes. It also provides various daemons and utilities, including device management, login management, network connection management, and event logging. The name systemd adheres to the Unix convention of naming daemons by appending the letter d, and also plays on the French phrase Système D (a person's ability to quickly adapt and improvise in the face of problems

Compiz () is a compositing window manager for the X Window System, using 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management. Effects, such as a minimization animation or a cube workspace, are implemented as loadable plugins. Because it conforms to the ICCCM conventions, Compiz can be used as a substitute for the default Mutter or Metacity, when using GNOME Panel, or KWin in KDE Plasma Workspaces. Internally Compiz uses the OpenGL library as the interface to the graphics hardware.

freedesktop.org (fd.o), formerly X Desktop Group (XDG), is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Although freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, it is not a formal standards body.

D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus"

graphics-related software library

free and open-source library for 3D graphics rendering

Xgl is an obsolete display server implementation supporting the X Window System protocol designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL. It supports hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz or Beryl. The project was started by David Reveman of Novell and first released on January 2, 2006. It was removed from the X.org server in favor of AIGLX on June 12, 2008.

zero-configuration networking (zeroconf) implementation

bootsplash for Linux

free software PDF rendering library

thumb|300px|GLX and AIGLX versus direct rendering. thumb|Compiz running on Fedora Core 6 with AIGLX. Accelerated Indirect GLX ("AIGLX") is an open source project founded by Red Hat and the Fedora community, led by Kristian Høgsberg, to allow accelerated indirect GLX rendering capabilities to the X.Org Server and DRI drivers. This allows remote X clients to get fully hardware accelerated rendering over the GLX protocol; coincidentally, this development was required for OpenGL compositing window managers to function with hardware acceleration.

open source software driver for Nvidia GPU

library

HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of Persian calque harf-bāz, literally "open type") is an open-source text shaping engine written in C++. Text shaping is the process of converting a sequence of Unicode code points into the correct glyph identifiers and precise positions needed to render text on screen or in print. For scripts where characters change shape depending on their neighbours (such as Arabic, Devanagari, or Tamil), text shaping ensures that the right glyph forms are selected and joined correctly. Without it, text renderers would display raw disconnected code points rather than readable

software framework

Polkit (formerly PolicyKit) is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems. It provides an organized way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones. Polkit allows a level of control of centralized system policy. It is developed and maintained by David Zeuthen from Red Hat and hosted by the freedesktop.org project. It is published as free software under the terms of version 2 of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

The GLib Object System, or GObject, is a free software library providing a portable object system and transparent cross-language interoperability. GObject is designed for use both directly in C programs to provide object-oriented C-based APIs and through bindings to other languages to provide transparent cross-language interoperability, e.g. PyGObject.

software subsystem for UNIX-like operating systems providing hardware abstraction

input method software platform containing support for more than thirty languages

OpenRaster is a file format proposed for the common exchange of layered images between raster graphics editors. It is meant as a replacement for later versions of the Adobe PSD format. OpenRaster is still in development and so far is supported by a few programs. The default file extension for OpenRaster files is ".ora".

thumb|right|250px|Four Head Xinerama thumb|right|250px|Modern Xinerama example Xinerama is an extension to the X Window System that enables X applications and window managers to use two or more physical displays as one large virtual display.

thumb|X11-clients use XCB to communicate with the display server|X server. thumb|A more complete view of the Linux graphics stack thumb|Programs often use GTK or [[FLTK or Qt for their GUI widgets.]] thumb|A more complete view of the components of an operating system for home computers.

real-time communication software framework

pkg-config is a software development tool that queries information about libraries from a local, file-based database for the purpose of building a codebase that depends on them. It allows for sharing a codebase in a cross-platform way by using host-specific library information that is stored outside of yet referenced by the codebase. This indirection allows the codebase to build on a host without encoding host-specific library information in the codebase.

annual international convention

DeviceKit is a modular hardware abstraction layer designed for use in Linux systems that is designed to simplify device management and replace the current monolithic Linux HAL. DeviceKit includes the ability to enumerate system devices and send notifications when hardware is added or removed from the computer system.

Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library () distributed under the MIT License. VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia.

Xft, the X FreeType interface library, is a free computer program library written by Keith Packard. It uses the MIT/X license that The Open Group applied after the post X11R6.4 license restoration.

x Window extension

UPower (previously DeviceKit-power) is a piece of middleware (an abstraction layer) for power management on Linux systems. It enumerates power sources, maintains statistics and history data on them and notifies about status changes. It consists of a daemon (upowerd), an application programming interface and a set of command line tools. The daemon provides its functionality to applications over the system bus (an instance of D-Bus, service org.freedesktop.UPower). PolicyKit restricts access to the UPower functionality for initiating hibernate mode or shutting down the operating system (freedesk