Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please! [LWN.net]

Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please!

Posted Feb 21, 2007 16:42 UTC (Wed) by cantsin (subscriber, #4420)
In reply to: Grumpy Editor - lightweight window managers please! by khim
Parent article: Xfce 4.4: The best lightweight desktop environment (Linux.com)

Please let's not confuse window managers and desktop environments. A window manager, in the narrow sense, only decorates, places and resizes X11 windows. (Examples would be aewm, sawfish, evilwm, ratpoison, ion, but also XFCE's xfwm, Gnome's metacity and KDE's kwin). A number of "window managers" stretch that definition by also providing in-process panels, taskbars, docks, or application menus (fvwm, Window Maker, black/flux/openbox, icewm being perhaps the most popular examples). In a desktop environment however, these components run as separate processes. On top of that, a desktop environment also includes graphical file management, typically also desktop icons and last not least graphical setup menus, with configuration changes being effective on the fly as opposed to restarting a wm. The single components of a desktop environment have a consistent look and feel and can interact via drag-and-drop, thanks to a common GUI toolkit and the use of mechanisms/APIs such as those of freedesktop.org.

For the end user, the main difference between a WM - even a WM that accomplish more than pure window management - and a DE is that the latter is fully and consistently operable through the GUI, never throwing users back to the command line for standard tasks like file management and desktop configuration. To my knowledge, only KDE, Gnome and XFCE match those criteria of a genuine desktop environment in the Unix-compatible, X11-based free software world. And among those three, XFCE is the only one that restrains itself to being just a desktop, and not a complete middleware layer with, among others, its own component architecture and massive set of DE-specific libraries and demons. So it is more than just a window manager on the one hand. On the other, in comparison to Gnome and KDE, it is very much like Galeon and later Firefox in relation to the older, heavier, integrated Mozilla suite (now Seamonkey). Just like Galeon had the slogan "the web and only the web", XFCE could deservedly claim to be "the desktop and only the desktop". I wouldn't be surprised if what proved to be a winning formula for free software web browsers could also become a success formula for the free software desktop. With version 4.4, XFCE achieves for the desktop what the first stable versions of Galeon and Firefox achieved for web browsing.

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