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, andthereforebring it on more common ground with Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X in this specific area.

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

The project has Alex Graveley (GNOME) and George Staikos (KDE) as two of the task force leaders, who will look to gain feedback from ISVs, integration possibilities, and possibly create a draft implementation as well.

A goal for the Portland Project is to have it be included in Linux Standard Base 4.0, due in 2008.

The initial Portland Project meeting, held in Portland, Oregon, was sponsored by the Desktop Linux Working Group of OSDL. At the start of that initial meeting, Nat Friedman of Novell came up with the project name: "well, we are here in Portland... how about the Portland Project?"