16 lines
3.3 KiB
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16 lines
3.3 KiB
Text
Okay!! Desktop environment is. Ugh, how do I even explain this? It's a completely foreign concept to a Windows or MacOS user
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I mean, the same is true of Distros, but-
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**TO MY UNDERSTANDING:** Okay, so you know how Windows Explorer is tied to the window management and special effects rendering for some fucking reason? A desktop environment (sometime called DE) is like, if you could replace Windows Explorer. And Notepad, Paint and System Settings. Because in Linux, all of these are just _ways to access the same underlying systems_, instead of being the systems themselves like some kind of horrible nightmare reality.
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There are way too many Desktop Environments. The popular ones are GNOME and KDE, which both are terrible in their own unique ways (KDE is actually way less bad, but it feels too much like Windows (The OS) to me). See also Cinnamon, a fork of early GNOME with more customization built-in at the cost of lacking some features, and XFCE and MATE which are light without being bare-bones Tiling Window Managers. And Unity (desktop environment), the one that Ubuntu (distro) used to pack back in the day, which is the one you might have thought of when Linux was brought up if we lived a few years ago from today. It has a lot of options for special graphical effects that have been since replicated in other DEs, like the *Desktop Cube*.
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Oh, gosh, have you even heard about Workspaces? Get this: It's just the Windows "dekstops" feature activated with Win (sometimes called Super) + Tab. You can have multiple arrangements of different windows on the same display but you have to switch between them manually.
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Desktop Environments go on top of Window Managers, which go on top of Display Servers.
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Window Managers do, what they say they do, organize windows on top of one another. Or tiling like when you drag a window to the right/left/top/bottom of the screen. They also handle decorations (window borders, title bars). They're actually only present in X11, as opposed to Wayland, where they are called Compositors. I will be talking about two of those terms briefly.
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Tiling WMs are uhhhm... Window Managers that specifically can (usually??) Only do Tiling in fractions of the screen real-estate, instead of Stacking on top of each other. They don't tend to come with desktop environments to my knowledge, making them very light at the cost of having to install your own utilities.
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X11 and Wayland are display servers. The things that apps talk to when they wish to draw pixels to the screen or receive inputs from devices (keyboard, mouse, controllers). It's called a Server because the applications behave as Clients to it, speaking the same X11 Protocol in the traditional Client-Server connection most computer systems use (as opposed to Peer-to-Peer, where every computer in a network has the same authority.)
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Wayland is _like_ X11 but more modern. From an end-user perspective, it is a little worse: resizing windows is way smoother, but windows can't be Always-on-Top by default. Apparently X11 has no encryption, which is a security risk
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...Uhm, Xorg is an implementation of X11, but it is the only maintained one to my knowledge, so for our purposes Xorg and X11 are interchangeable. Besides SurfaceFlinger, but that is used by Android. Did you know Android is a derivative of Linux?? A horrible nightmare reality distortion of Linux, but still Linux.
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