GNOME Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the popular GNOME desktop environment designed for Linux-based operating systems, announced on Wednesday that they plan on supporting Purism's Librem 5 smartphone.

The announcement comes only a week after KDE unveiled their plans to work with Purism on an implementation of their Plasma Mobile interface into the security- and privacy-focused Librem 5 Linux smartphone, and now GNOME is interested in advancing the Librem 5 hardware platform as a GNOME/GTK+ phone device.

"Having a Free/Libre and Open Source software stack on a mobile device is a dream-come-true for so many people, and Purism has the proven team to make this happen. We are very pleased to see Purism and the Librem 5 hardware be built to support GNOME," said Neil McGovern, Executive Director, GNOME Foundation.

Librem 5 needs one million more dollars to become a reality

Currently under a crowdfunding campaign, Librem 5 needs to raise about one million more dollars in a month (33 days at the moment of writing) to become a reality, to become world’s first free and open source Linux smartphone that comes built-in with enhanced user protections and end-to-end encryption.

If the campaign proves to be successful, the GNOME Foundation vows to add various enhancements and general performance improvements to the GNOME Shell user interface of the GNOME desktop environment to make it compatible with Purism's Librem 5 smartphone, which will also use the Plasma Mobile UI.

We said it before and we'll say it again, the reality is that the mobile phone market is oversaturated, so there's no room for a small company to make and sell yet another Linux smartphone. Google's Android platform is hugely popular among Linux users, not to talk about iPhone fans. But you can support Librem 5 too, if you want.