From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Sep 17 20: 1:41 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from IMGate1.cshore.com (imgate1.cshore.com [63.237.136.14]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4799A37B409 for ; Mon, 17 Sep 2001 20:01:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sephiroth (unknown [63.112.157.51]) by IMGate1.cshore.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 4B5E324075; Mon, 17 Sep 2001 23:19:51 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 23:04:35 -0400 From: Matthew Graybosch To: "Gerald T. Freymann" Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Best X Windows Manager for Newbies Message-Id: <20010917230435.1050bc62.matthew@starbreaker.net> In-Reply-To: <20010917223022.W79091-100000@scaryg.shacknet.nu> References: <20010917222208.054b4f37.matthew@starbreaker.net> <20010917223022.W79091-100000@scaryg.shacknet.nu> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.5.3 (GTK+ 1.2.9; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Not that stupid a question on your part, Gerry. A newbie might not feel confident enough or know enough to ask, and I don't mind answering. KDE provides its own windowmanager, which used to be called kwm in the 1.x series. GNOME never had it's "own" windowmanager; its designers preferred to have ride another windowmanger piggyback. The default GNOME windowmanager appears to be Sawfish, but GNOME can also run on top of Enlightenment, WindowMaker, and IceWM. I've even seen it run on top of TWM, and I hope never to see it again. The main selling points of GNOME and KDE are the common interfaces of programs associated with their respective environments. Since all GNOME programs use the GTK+ libs, they all have a common look. This goes for all KDE apps since they all use the Qt libs. KDE programs can run in GNOME, and vice versa. GNOME and KDE are desktop environments. Each tries to do more than straight window management; each tries to abstract Unix from the user. We could start a holy war over whether this is good or bad. I'll settle for saying that I prefer to avoid abstraction whenever possible. If I didn't want to get under the hood, I'd have stuck with Windows and never even touched DOS. ****** Matthew Graybosch [matthew@starbreaker.net] http://www.starbreaker.net :: where dreams and reality collide "Screw Sartre. Hell isn't other people. Hell is debugging other people's code." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message