[wplug] {window,desktop} {environment,manager}

[Christopher DeMarco]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 11:01:13PM -0400, Brandon Kuczenski wrote:

> What's the difference   between a "window  manager"  and a  "desktop
> environment"?

A window   manager takes  an  X11 app  and gives  it  user  controls -
titlebar, resize  bindings, movement bindings, possibly iconification,
etc.

A desktop environment provides "other stuff" with a common appearance,
format, user  interface and  (presumably) API.  A  DE  includes one or
more window  managers   (although  extremists might  consider  a  text
console the most-basic  DE)  which may or may   not be part  of the DE
project.

One  example  would be  GNOME, which  used   to use  a third-party  WM
(Sawfish) but which now uses its own (Metacity).

There is a goodly amount  of flammage about  whether a WM or DE should
properly   include  various items e.g.   icon  manager, taskbar, theme
support.


> Specifically, what's the difference between Gnome and Enlightenment?
> i.e.   what are    their   different roles  in  the   user-interface
> experience?  And where does 'nautilus' fit in?

GNOME is  a  DE; Enlightenment  is a   WM.   The E  file manager   and
associated other  apps would,  together with  E, be  considered  a DE.
Further to the muddification of the waters, the WM which a DE uses can
be  changed - I  can  replace GNOME's  Metacity with E   if I want  to
further saturate my CPU and memory usage.

Nautilus is  a part of  the GNOME DE.  You can  run the  panel without
Nautilus (which I  do), the window manager without  the panel,  or any
other combination of  components - but  underneath them all are the DE
subsystems, like bonobo and the  gnome-session-manager.  So while they
could   be   considered standalone   applications,    the user-visible
applications all use  the common framework  of the GNOME DE.  Perhaps,
in this  light, the  GNOME  DE might alternatively  be  defined as the
subsystem   upon  which  applications may    rely in order  to provide
consistent and  interoperative interfaces, capabilities  and API.  GNU
might therefore be considered by some taxonomic freaks to be a DE.

It's interesting to note that while the DE wars are far from over, the
*widget* wars seem to be very strongly favoring  GTK over Qt, and this
may be the battle which  costs KDE the war.  I  prefer KDE to GNOME in
most cases,  but the apps which I  use most frequently (notably JPilot
and Firefox) are  primarily built with  GTK support.  I'm not about to
run     two  sets of  toolikts      (yeah, I  know   about  readline's
'transpose-chars',  but dammit  I  like that misslepping)  at the same
time, so poor KDE gets  marginalized on my  boxen.  Now, this  weekend
when I replace  Fedorka with Gentoo, I  intend to wast^H^H^H^H  invest
countless hours in   experimenting with JPilot, Firefox, etc.  ebuilds
with "-GTK +QT" USE flags...


-- 
% You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
Christopher DeMarco <cdemarco at fastmail.fm>          
PGP public key ID 0x2E76CF5C @ pgp.mit.edu
+6012 232 2106