Reminder of the Distinction Between a DE and a WM

Story: Forget GNOME and KDE, Xfce 4.8 Runs Simpler and FasterTotal Replies: 8
Author Content
vainrveenr

Jan 25, 2011
4:37 PM EDT 		Byfield starts off his piece by writing:
Quoting:A few times each month, I tire of the complexities of GNOME and KDE. Then I turn to a simpler, faster desktop for a couple of days or a week -- and that desktop, more often than not, is Xfce. No other desktop I’m aware of balances convenience and speed half so well.
When Byfield mentions "No other desktop...", he presumably means a Desktop Environment.

AAMOF, although Byfield does not specifically mention this in the piece, LXDE also happens to be another viable Desktop Environment.

The distinction between a Desktop Environment and a Window Manager is well-worth mentioning here as a reminder.

A good expose of this distinction is Matt Chapman's 'Window Managers for X: Introduction' found at http://xwinman.org/intro.php .

Chapman writes appropriately in his section Window Managers:
Quoting:One of the guiding philosophies of The X Window System (and also UNIX itself) is that its functionality is achieved through the co-operation of separate components, rather than everything being entwined in one huge mass (or should that be mess?). The advantage of this is that a particular part of the system can be changed simply by replacing the relevant component. The best example of this is the concept of a window manager which is essentially the component which controls the appearance of windows and provides the means by which the user can interact with them. Virtually everything which appears on the screen in X is in a window, and a window manager quite simply manages them.

Let's face it, people are different, and those that use computers use them in different ways for different tasks. So why do some think we should all use (suffer?) the same interface? Fortunately X doesn't suffer from this degree of rigidity, and to this end, a large number of window managers have been developed, which between them provide a large range of different appearances and different behaviours. Furthermore, most of these window managers are themselves heavily customisable. This means that a newcomer to X has firstly a choice of window manager, and then a choice of the precise configuration of the chosen window manager.

And on top of that, more recent developments have created a new breed of desktop environments which aim to provide a more complete interface to the operating system, and supply their own range of integrated utilities and applications. This convenience and ease of use makes them particularly attractive to new users, which has made them very popular in the rapidly growing Linux market, with distributors like Red Hat bundling the two main freely available desktops (KDE and GNOME).


Again, a Desktop Environment can be distinguished from a Window Manager.

Several commonly-used, non-native WM's are

- Window Maker, http://www.windowmaker.info/

- IceWM, http://www.icewm.org/

- Fluxbox, http://fluxbox.org/

- FVWM, http://www.fvwm.org/

- AfterStep, http://www.afterstep.org/

(see also Chapman's 'relative popularity of the window managers' found at http://xwinman.org/vote.php )

A practical use of this DE-WM distinction is the possibility that Byfield and/or others can experiment and discover whether one or more of these non-native WM's can effectively balance "convenience and speed" as well as or even BETTER THAN the native WM of a particular DE (e.g., the Desktop Environments GNOME,KDE,Xfce,LXDE).
Sander_Marechal

Jan 25, 2011
6:48 PM EDT
Quoting:A practical use of this DE-WM distinction is the possibility that Byfield and/or others can experiment and discover whether one or more of these non-native WM's can effectively balance "convenience and speed" as well as or even BETTER THAN the native WM of a particular DE (e.g., the Desktop Environments GNOME,KDE,Xfce,LXDE).


YES! I'm a very happy Gnome user for some time now.... with Awesome WM as my Window Manager.
Steven_Rosenber

Jan 25, 2011
8:20 PM EDT 		I still don't know the difference.
Bob_Robertson

Jan 25, 2011
8:31 PM EDT 		The "window manager" is just that, and only that. So "Kwm" is the window manager used by the KDE "desktop environment".

It's like saying "engine" and "car". Car includes engine, even if you can swap it for other engines, but engine does not include the whole car.
Steven_Rosenber

Jan 25, 2011
8:52 PM EDT 		So what's the rest of the desktop environment? If you bundle a file manager and a few config. utilities, you have a DE?
tuxchick

Jan 25, 2011
9:20 PM EDT 		This reminds me of the argument that "Linux is a kernel, not an operating system!" One of those technical niceties that aren't particularly relevant anymore. Way back in the olden days of Gnome 1.4 it was fun to swap window managers just to see what difference it made, and then complain bitterly when Gnome 2.x was released in all of its incapable glory, using the feeble Metacity window manager that couldn't do anything. But then neither could Gnome. I remember trying to use Sawfish, but it was pointless and I joined the legions of defectors that went to Enlightenment, KDE, and other graphical environments.
ComputerBob

Jan 26, 2011
9:46 AM EDT 		I understand that not everyone cares about, or considers there to still be a considerable difference between, a DE and a WM.

But those of us who do, still appreciate the clarity and efficiency of communication that can be achieved when others properly use the two terms -- and cringe at the loss of it when others use them interchangeably.
jdixon

Jan 26, 2011
10:24 AM EDT 		> If you bundle a file manager and a few config. utilities, you have a DE?

File manager, sound control, printer control, keyboard settings, mouse settings, desktop settings (background, screensaver, shortcuts, etc.), logout function, application lauching, and probably a few other things I'm not thinking of. All of which could be assembled on a piece it together yourself basis, and some of which are actually provided by the windowing system itself, but are supplanted by the DE.
gus3

Jan 26, 2011
1:25 PM EDT
Quoting:If you bundle a file manager and a few config. utilities, you have a DE?
I run Sawfish, with Ctrl-Alt-T configured to open a terminal window. After that, I have all the utilities I need, right at my fingertips.

On my netbook (EeePC 90[0?/1?]), it's a very nice DE.

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