Re: How to Switch Between Gnome and KDE
On Sat, 5 Apr 2014 14:12:15 -0700 (PDT)
ray <ray@aarden.us> wrote:
>
> > Which desktop manager are you using? Once we know, one of us will
> > be able to tell you how to switch.
> > I'm sure that you don't need to edit anything.
>
> I appologize as I am new to Linux I may need some help in the
> terminology. Please help me understand 'which desktop manager'.
> When I said I have been running Gnome on Debian 7.4, I thought Gnome
> was the desktop manager. Is there something else that is a desktop
> manager?
>
Gnome is referred to as a desktop environment, as it is much more than
just a manager of windows, menus etc. KDE is the other heavyweight DE,
there are two medium-weight DEs, LXDE and Xfce4. There is also at least
one fork of an older version of Gnome, as the current Gnome is a bit
heavy on resources and won't run well on hardware more than a few years
old.
Then it gets complicated...
There are window managers which can be used by themselves, without a
desktop environment, though all DEs must use a window manager. The
simplest just provide a menu from which to launch applications. Because
they are so simple, they are very fast in their own operations, and
don't take much processing time away from applications. The price is
that you do everything yourself, there are no system trays with
notifications, clocks etc. All of these things need to be added
manually.
The good news is that you can play with all of them. You can install
all four major desktop environments, and all the window managers you
can find, and try them all out from the display manager, which is
basically a graphical login shell used to start a window manager or DE.
Eventually you will probably settle on one environment, whether a
window manager or full desktop environment. Even then, there are
applications which 'belong' to one environment but can be used in any
of them. I have an occasional use for Konqueror, which is a KDE
application, but runs fine in LXDE, which is my preferred DE.
--
Joe
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