freedesktop.org (fd.o), formerly X Desktop Group (XDG),[1][2] 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.

[3] The project was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000.

In 2006, the project released Portland 1.0 (xdg-utils), a set of common interfaces for desktop environments.

[15] Besides the variables mentioned below, XDG BDS also specifies that users' local binary files may be installed into $HOME/.local/bin.

Systems compliant with the spec are expected to make this directory available in their CLI's PATH environment variable.