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The Linux distillery Seeing Linux clearly: Demystifying KDE and GNOME
The Linux distillery Seeing Linux clearly: Demystifying KDE and GNOME | Seeing Linux clearly: Demystifying KDE and GNOME |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 19 May 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 5 A window manager controls the placement and appearance of the actual windows and dialogs that are shown on screen. One window manager might copy the Microsoft Windows look, with minimise, maximise and close buttons on the top right. It may have rounded radio buttons. Or, another window manager might have diamond shaped radio buttons. It may also have a metallic 3D appearance. Its buttons might have rounded corners.This perhaps may explain why when we talk about KDE and GNOME it’s not immediately apparent just what’s going on. Anyone who comes from a Microsoft Windows or MacOS world has been brought up with the concept that your operating system has just one look. You might be able to tweak it or apply a few colour schemes and minor themes, but fundamentally Windows looks like Windows anywhere. In the Linux world any number of different looks can apply because the window managers are replaceable. I still haven’t told you precisely what KDE and GNOME are; they’re not window managers – or at least, not in total. Where these guys come in is that they provide what we call a full desktop environment. In fact, KDE stands for the “K Desktop Environment,” with “K” being its real name, so to speak. So what’s a desktop environment? Well, that’s really just fancy speak for a window manager with some apps bundled in. So now we come to the crux: KDE and GNOME are two different sets of look-and-feels for Linux which define what windows will look like, what buttons will look like, how title bars will operate and the like, as well as some apps bundled in. Imagine if you installed Microsoft Windows and it said “Hey, do you want me to look like Windows Vista or Windows XP or Windows 3.1” – and changed its appearance to suit, but still had all the same functionality underneath? Even if you chose the Windows 3.1 look you could still have long file names, run IE7 and so forth. It’s similar with these desktop environments except they’re both contemporary. When you use Linux you can quite simply change the entire way your screens look – but at no time are you reducing what you can really do with the system. Experienced Linux users bandy about the terms KDE and GNOME with nary a thought. Yet, when I think about it, it’s not surprising that newcomers don’t grasp just what these buzzwords mean. Even if you’re not a total newcomer it’s still no guarantee you’ve got your head around them. After all, one reason Ubuntu is popular is because it makes a lot of choices for you and effectively gives no choice. Ubuntu uses the GNOME desktop manager and doesn’t ask if you think you want to use KDE. That’s a good thing; new users don’t get confronted with a question that could well make no sense to them. Of course, it’s also a bad thing; Ubuntu users don’t need to know they’re using GNOME or that KDE (and other options) exist. To a lot of Ubuntu users, the way they see things pretty much is just what Linux is and what it looks like. CONTINUED |
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