On Sat, Jan 29, 2000 at 05:57:16AM -0500, tom r wrote:
Hi Tom,
Just a heads-up: things would look better when quoting your text if
you could set your mailer's wordwrap column at around 75
characters. On to your quandary:
[...]
> part of what I'm asking. What do they do, what do they do differently, and why ?
> I'm happily using KDE with (I assume) Xfree86 as my X server. I'm wondering
> what (of substance) would change if I used Gnome. Or do I completely
> misundertsand X ?
[...]
Nope, you've got the basic concepts of X down pat. Here's a simplified
overview of KDE and/or GNOME:
You've got your X server running, which is most likely, as you pointed
out, XFree86. The "traditional" view is that you run a window manager
on top of that, such as Enlightenment, FVWM2, WindowMaker, any of
several. GNOME and KDE add another layer of abstraction to this
picture by creating a GUI environment -- a sort of UI framework, if
you will. Within this framework, you run a window manager. KDE has its
own window manager (kwm, I think) that runs when you start KDE. This
does not preclude the use of other wm's within KDE, however; there's
more detail about that in the KDE docs. I don't use KDE, because its
default look-and-feel is too "polished" for my tastes. However, I like
the design of Qt (the UI libraries on which KDE is based) better than
that of GTK+ (the UI libraries on which GNOME is based). GNOME takes
the same approach, only it doesn't really have a default wm (yet --
there are some projects underway to change this, I think, perhaps for
GNOME 2). Currently, if your linux distribution comes with GNOME, or
if you download the package appropriate for your distribution and
install it, it comes with Enlightenment. However, I expect this to
change, since there seem to be some political rifts between the GNOME
people and the Enlightenment people. I personally prefer GNOME with
Sawmill.
Regarding running KDE apps in GNOME, and GTK+ apps in KDE: As I
mentioned, Qt is the set of C++ libraries ( http://www.troll.no/ )
upon which KDE is based. GTK+ ( http://www.gtk.org/ ) is the set of C
libraries upon which GNOME is based. Apart from the GNOME and KDE
environments themselves, there are many applications based upon GTK+,
and many based upon Qt. With that in mind, if you've got the
appropriate libraries installed, and you do if you have GNOME and KDE
installed and working properly, you can run GTK+ apps in KDE and KDE
apps (Qt apps) in GNOME.
Long-winded, but hopefully helpful.
c./
--
Chris Woods <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"After all, aren't we just a bunch of drinkers with a computer problem?"
-- Rich Soule on the GNHLUG mailing list
Save the penguins! http://www.penguins.org.au/
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