whats the dif

[thesimplecreator]

whats the difference between a desktop enviroment and a window manager?

[budman7]

DE's are more full-featured than WM's.
See Window Managers for X: Introduction for more info on the difference.

[thesimplecreator]

so they are basically the same thing, just one has more features

[Tsarevich]

They are not really the same thing. In Linux, X is the WM. It is used to run GUI based apps. No matter which DE you are using. Console based apps run without the need of WMs. They can be ./ed in CLI as well. If you try to ./ a GUI based app in a CLI, it will complain.

[oz]

Check this site for a description of them:

X window manager desktop environment guide

[Cabhan]

Okay. Let's start simply.

So we have a few layers to the GUI world. The lowest layer is the X server. The X server provides the ability to draw things on the screen. Every graphical thing you have ever seen is just pixels drawn to the screen.

Now, the X server is VERY powerful, but it isn't very useful for the end user. I might draw a window to the screen, but then I might have another window overlap it. Now the original window is obscured. I would need to eventually redraw it at some point. This is a lot to manage.

This is where the window manager comes in. This quite simply manages windows. It keeps track of what windows are open, it redraws windows when necessary. It also adds that bar on the top that has the window title, minimize and close buttons, etc. Window managers can stretch from extremely minimalist (IceWM) to minimalist (Fluxbox) to a bit more powerful (Enlightenment 16) to quite nice (Compiz Fusion). Each of these has different capabilities. For instance, Fluxbox provides a taskbar, while Openbox requires a separate application for that.

Most window managers are quite usable in their own right (there are some exceptions, such as Compiz or Metacity). In fact, I use Fluxbox myself. However, some people prefer more fully-featured graphical environments. These are called desktop environments. Desktop environments generally include a window manager, a control center, a number of utilities and configuration apps, and maybe even their own applications. For instance, Gnome comes with the Nautilus file browser and the Evolution e-mail client. With a window manager, you would supply your own applications for these purposes.

That's the basic difference. I recommend that you try out some various WMs and DEs to see whatever suits you the best.

Some popular WMs are: Fluxbox, Enlightenment, Fvwm, and Ion.

The main DEs out there are KDE, Gnome, and Xfce.

[thesimplecreator]

oh i get it now thx