On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 03:41:28PM +0100, mick crane wrote: > Not sure what this is about. > Isn't a desktop manager, display environment whatever its called a way to > present icons that you can click on and it starts a program you want to use > and then gets out of the way ?
A window manager is a program that allows the placement and resizing of windows, and controls which one is "on top", and so on. There are lot of window managers, and many of them offer a whole bunch of features like menus, icons, program activation from either of those, binding of keys to actions, etc. A desktop environment is a window manager PLUS a whole crapload of additional stuff that I do not personally understand. But it's really big and really complicated. Like, for example, fvwm has an installed-size of about 6.5 megabytes. How big is GNOME? I wouldn't be surprised if it's two orders of magnitude larger than that, just for its "core" components, not counting a bunch of games or whatever else can be added on.
