Desktop environments versus window managers [LWN.net]

Desktop environments versus window managers

Posted Nov 10, 2011 11:07 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)

In the early days you would pick a window manager: twm, fvwm, icewm or whatever. But while it might make your desktop look superficially pretty, it wouldn't affect any of the applications you ran, which would probably still be an inconsistent mess of different toolkits with different looks and behaviour.

Then when KDE first started it set out to address this: there would be a set of applications and tools, with consistent behaviour, and good support for writing new applications with the same framework. It was no longer correct to refer to KDE or GNOME as a 'window manager' - they were much more.

Now, when KDE 4 or GNOME 3 were released, hardly anyone even mentioned the changes to the libraries and framework for writing applications. All that anyone focuses on is the window management behaviour and a few other user-facing widgets such as the panel. And there may be good reasons for this when you look at the most important applications: Firefox, possibly a mail client, OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and for more technical users a terminal window or text editor such as Emacs. These all use their own GUI libraries which have usually evolved from 20-year-old code or been built from scratch to be cross-platform. Although they will use many of the freedesktop.org libraries they don't wholeheartedly embrace the GNOME or KDE way of writing applications. And third party development will usually make web apps in Javascript and HTML.

Has freedesktop.org taken over the job of library development to such an extent that GNOME and KDE can be considered as mere window managers?

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Desktop environments versus window managers

Posted Nov 10, 2011 14:28 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

Freedesktop.org is the collection of people helping out in the various desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, others). It is not another group of people. Libraries and specs are written by the various desktop environments and we try to ensure we share that work. Doesn't always work perfectly.

Without KDE, GNOME, other desktop environments, freedesktop.org does not exist.

Desktop environments versus window managers

Posted Nov 10, 2011 15:40 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

I think these are good observations. As you say, the KDE developers not only wanted their applications and accessories to have the same look and feel, but they also wanted to provide a framework for developing applications and the common functionality that one expects from a desktop environment.

In turn, this fed the demand for KDE, as opposed to just running a bunch of applications and a window manager, because one could be sure that dragging something from one application to another, for example, would probably invoke a common operation (like dragging pictures from Digikam to something offering a file management interface invokes a dialogue about moving, copying or linking the pictures as files, which they are even as far as Digikam is concerned) rather than the drag operation not doing anything or doing something weird.

Cross-desktop integration has improved, but there's still the issue that various applications (including some of the mainstays of GNOME back when KDE seemed to offer its own coherent set of applications and GNOME clearly wasn't able to offer something comparable at the same level of integration) don't take proper advantage of core desktop functionality. I did run OpenOffice with KDE dialogues for a while, but it was a flawed experience.

It's easy to make the observation that GNOME in particular has backed even further away from the original KDE vision of a coherent suite of applications and desktop components, but if that is the case then what does that leave for the project's developers to work with? The start menu, some dialogues and whatever happens when the user presses Alt-Tab? The stark choice at that point is to either take a back seat and be like XFCE or to try and make that functionality more prominent somehow, but there has to be a good reason for doing the latter.