Adam Funk: > Rogério Brito wrote: > > > > But neither XFCE nor KDE are window managers. They are desktop > > environments. This is a common misconception among people discussing > > "graphical environments" for X. > > Educate me: what's the difference? A window manager is a program that just "manages windows". It gives applications an area on the screen where they can be displayed and most often the WM draws a border around it, gives it a nice title and enables the user to do things with these windows - put one on the foreground, minimize another one etc. Very often window managers come with some kind of a panel, virtual desktop support and some kind of application launcher (a "start menu" or icons on the panel), but strictly speaking, this is exceeding the task of a minimal WM. Desktop environments (KDE, Gnome. Xfce) do far more than that. They come with a file manager, draw the background with pixmaps and icons, they do some work behind your back to easily handle removable storage or enable drag'n drop. They come with "control centers" to do system administration and generally give the user a simplified, cleaned up view on their system. Applications supporting the DE all look the same and share a lot of routines to do common tasks. DEs also provide applications with a way to register themselves for a filetype which they can handle, which is then reflected when using the DE's file manager and so on... Of course, this list is not complete. J. -- I wear a lot of leather but would never wear fur. [Agree] [Disagree] <http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html>
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