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The Portland Project is an initiative taken to establish a greater Linux foothold in the desktop market. It aims at resolving a number of key factors that are believed to reduce the adoption rate of Linux distributions as desktop operating systems.

While the Tango Desktop Project was started to give users a more unified graphical experience, the Portland Project is intended to ease the porting of desktop applications to Linux for independent software vendors (ISVs). The project goal is to let software developers worry less about the desktop environment a distribution is using, and thus bring it on more common ground with Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X in this particular area.

The project recently released Portland 1.0 (xdg-utils, a set of common interfaces for desktop environments