San Jose, CA — As John Markoff reported for the NY Times, the open source software movement has taken a significant step toward a direct confrontation with Microsoft by introducing software that gives the powerful Linux operating system the ease-of-use found on Windows and Macintosh computers.

The program, which is known as Gnome, for GNU Network Object Model Environment, was introduced at the first Linux World computer exhibition. Its designers said that Gnome would make it possible for people who are not programmers or technicians to employ Linux and the software that runs on it comfortably.

Linux, which was developed over the last 15 years by a loosely organized movement of programmers known as GNU (the name stands for “GNU’s not Unix”) has been gaining ground among corporate and technical users of server computers and workstations due to its power and stability.

But as part of the Unix family of operating systems, it is manipulated by esoteric commands, not with the point-and-click graphical interfaces to which mouse-addicted consumers have grown used to.

Gnome puts a friendly face on Linux by inserting a graphical user interface between the operating system and the user, in much the way that Windows began as an interface between users and MS-DOS.

Over the past twelve months, the corporate world has begun to take Linux seriously, and its prospects brightened considerably with the announcement that I.B.M. would begin shipping it on some of its powerful servers.

The organizers of the free software movement have stated, however, that they do not intend to limit Linux to corporate systems engineers.

“This is aimed directly at the Windows desktop dominance,” said Jean Bozeman, a research manager at the International Data Corporation, a market research firm.

Gnome introduces a set of “themes” that mimic the appearance of various operating systems, including Windows and Macintosh.

Gnome’s development has been led by Miguel de Icaza, a 26-year-old Mexican programmer and systems administrator for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

He foresaw that the program would attract a strong international backing, noting for example that the Mexican Government was planning to distribute a million copies to schools as part of a system known as Scholarnet.

Gnome is distributed with a word processor, spreadsheet, data base, presentation manager, Web browser and e-mail. The program’s designers said they were hoping to persuade commercial software developers to convert their Windows programs to take advantage of Gnome’s features.