[Gllug] Wireless and Linux

[Richard Jones]

On Sun, Aug 02, 2009 at 10:04:59AM +0100, Tethys wrote:
> Just curious... how are you defining "Desktop Environment"? What is
> it that GNOME and KDE provide that a window manager doesn't? You
> know that both of them supply their own window manager, right? And
> that you can replace their "standard" window manager with your own?
> So the fact that you're running fvwm or windowmaker or whatever
> doesn't mean you have to lose whatever else it is that GNOME or KDE
> provide.
> 
> FWIW, in all these years, I still haven't got anyone to give me a
> concrete description of what either GNOME or KDE actually are. There's
> always a lot of handwaving and talk of Desktop Environments, but no
> one seems to know. AFAIK, it's some combination of window manager,
> application launcher, file manager, an API and a bunch of applications.
> But it's all very vague. And (in the GNOME and KDE implementations, at
> least) full of rampant layering violations, AFAICT.

A window manager gives you consistent decoration around each window
and (as the name suggests) some primitive window management: moving,
resizing and iconifying of windows; and an application menu.

GNOME and KDE are more like suites of software which are built to look
alike, work together, and have a unified method of configuration.
Each project also publishes a 'HIG', so it's not just the look which
is unified (ie. the widgets) but the HIG ensures that each application
will work in the same way too, and will have the same level of
accessibility.

So you get an editor, terminal app, calculator, games, and even an
office suite, which all act alike, even though none of them may be
best of breed.  [I wouldn't ever want to swap emacs for gedit.]

In practical terms, nothing stops you from mixing individual apps from
GNOME, KDE and elsewhere together.

Also, I don't think it's fair to say that GNOME is "full of rampant
layering violations".  If you use the GNOME applications outside the
GNOME environment (eg. on Windows - as we did with the Fedora MinGW
project) you'll see that by and large they run very well, and the
libraries are organized into nice, clearly defined layers.  I can't
speak for KDE, but Qt also works well on Windows.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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