On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, Cristian Burneci wrote:
> Desktop managers are a conglomerate of applications and libraries. They
> tend to set some kind of standards. They offer a widget library, a
> window manager, some sort of other libraries which offer various
> solutions i.e. for multimedia issues, and a pack of programs including
> file managers, browsers, games, editors, word processors, media players
> and so on. Also they offer ways of managing your desktop appearance and
> some other bells and whistles which bring them very close to a well
> known GUI based OS from Redmond :-). Most populars are Gnome (based
> on GTK widget library) and KDE (based on QT widget library).
Absolutely!
One thing I don't like about the Desktop Environments
is that they often take over certain resources and then
don't allow other non-DE programs to run correctly.
The example that comes to mind is that esd is started
when Enlightenment starts. If you then try to run a
sound app that esd doesn't know about, your non-Gnome-
compliant sound app won't run. (unless you know that
you must kill esd first, which most people WON'T know,
but then your Gnome sounds won't work... or I think
there's a series of menus to go through to get to a
place where you can add non-DE programs to the DE's
"awareness.") Gack!
I'll take a simple window manager, text config files,
and leave the Desktop Environments for the Redmond
immigrants.
- Steve
