Paul Scott wrote: > Back to newbie type questions. I am not clear enough on the > relationship between window managers and desktop environments. I just > found http://www.windowmaker.org/ which makes me think I am running > GNUStep with WindowMaker. There is a GNUStep directory in /root. Is > that likely to be what I got with the potato install if I didn't do > anything special? I stupidly thought I was running Gnome because I had > all of these Gnome things like Gnome Terminal and GnotePad+.
Back to first principles... First, there is X Windows. This provides you with a graphical display and a mouse cursor and windows, but the windows have no border decorations (title bar, buttons, resizing corners, etc.), and they all just pile on top of one another in the top-left-hand corner. A window manager is a special X Windows application that, as the name says, manages your windows. It provides the window borders and handles your interaction with them. It decides where to position new windows when they are created. Often it provides limited graphical-shell-like capabilities, such as root window menus. A desktop environment is a set of graphical shell tools such as panels, file managers, terminal emulators, and miscellaneous general tools such as calculators and calendars. To some extent the distinction between window managers and desktop environments is arbitrary. GNOME and KDE are desktop environments, but they come with their own window managers (Sawfish for GNOME, and I forget what KDE's is called -- KWM, perhaps?). Enlightenment is a window manager, but its newer features are heading in the direction of becoming a full-fledged desktop environment. You can use any window manager with any desktop environment (or no desktop environment at all), although it's usually best to choose a window manager that has special support (if any is needed) for your desktop environment. Also, you can mix desktop environments. It's quite possible to have, say, GNOME and KDE installed at the same time, and run programs from both of them at once. Most likely you would not want to run, for instance, the GNOME file manager and the KDE file manager at the same time, since they do the same things and you'd probably just choose one, but there's nothing stopping you if you want to do that. It's even possible to run programs from GNOME or KDE without running their desktop tools. For a while, on a machine with somewhat limited memory, I had GNOME installed, and ran GNOME programs, but did not use the GNOME panel or session manager. (This caused a little bitching on stderr from GNOME programs, but to no ill effect.) Craig
