Difference between revisions of "Xorg Desktop Environment"

Revision as of 20:30, 31 October 2024

A desktop environment bundles together a variety of components to provide common graphical user interface elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. Additionally, most desktop environments include a set of integrated applications and utilities. Most importantly, desktop environments provide their own window manager, which can however usually be replaced with another compatible one.

"Some" Examples compatible with Ubuntu/Mint

• Cinnamon — Cinnamon strives to provide a traditional user experience. Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3.
• Enlightenment — The Enlightenment desktop shell provides an efficient window manager based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries along with other essential desktop components like a file manager, desktop icons and widgets. It supports themes, while still being capable of performing on older hardware or embedded devices.
• GNOME — The GNOME desktop environment is an attractive and intuitive desktop with both a modern (GNOME) and a classic (GNOME Classic) session.
• KDE Plasma — The KDE Plasma desktop environment is a familiar working environment. Plasma offers all the tools required for a modern desktop computing experience so you can be productive right from the start.
• MATE — Mate provides an intuitive and attractive desktop to Linux users using traditional metaphors. MATE started as a fork of GNOME 2, but now uses GTK 3.
• Xfce — Xfce embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. It consists of a number of components that provide the full functionality one can expect of a modern desktop environment, while remaining relatively light. They are packaged separately and you can pick among the available packages to create the optimal personal working environment.

The X Window System, also known as X11 or simply "X," is a protocol for creating a graphical user interface (GUI) on Unix and Unix-like systems, including Linux. X.Org is an open-source implementation of the X Window System protocol. It's the most widely used implementation on Linux systems today. X is the protocol, while X.Org is an implementation of that protocol.

See also X Window System Display Managers

An alternative to X11 (X Window System) is a modern display server protocol called Wayland. The X Window System is a complex, layered protocol that includes the X server, window manager, and sometimes compositor to manage windows, input, and rendering. X has been described as bloated with excessive extensions and unnecessary features. Wayland simplifies this by consolidating responsibilities. It combines the display server and compositor into a single protocol, eliminating the need for separate processes to manage window display and rendering.

Compatibility: X11 is more native to Linux so to use Wayland instead a compatibility layer called XWayland had to be developed. XWayland allows X11 applications to run in a Wayland environment, so users can still use applications not natively designed for Wayland.