Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 13:22:27 -0700 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: leegold <goldtech@worldpost.com> Cc: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: couple'a'questions Message-ID: <3925A283.D0FC67E3@acuson.com> References: <002201bfc1cd$4e640f20$b2e47ad1@leegold1>
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leegold wrote: > 2a. please explain the differences between (the different roles played by): > xfree86 > gnome > enlightenment XFree86 is a graphical "engine" for Unix. In Windoze terms, it is roughly equivalent to the win32 api. Enlightenment is a window manager. It controls all the other windows on the screen, how they are drawn, where they are placed, etc. Under Windoze, the old progman.exe is equivalent. Gnome, KDE, XFCE and CDE are "desktop environments". They are additional tools, applications and API's on top of the window manager that give additional functionality, feel and ease-of-use. Again, under Windoze, this is roughly equivalent to the taskbar, explorer and MFC, all rolled up into one. A better comparison can be made with OS/2, which didn't try to blend all the functionality together into one homogenous mess. X is equivalent to the graphical API's, window managers are equivalent to the Presentation Manager, and Gnome is equivalent to the Workplace shell. Window managers I would heartily recommend you experiment with under FreeBSD are WindowMaker and ICE. Enlightenment is a fantastic window manager, but my personal experience with it under FreeBSD was that it was unstable. It would be better to use Sawmill with Gnome. And as for desktops, I still prefer KDE over Gnome. Under FreeBSD, Gnome continually crashed on me. But it's a snap installing and uninstalling packages with FreeBSD, so try them all out! -- David Johnson... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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