[H-GEN] Gnome, KDE, etc.

[Ben Fowler]

(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Ben Fowler <b1.fowler at student.qut.edu.au>)

Hi Anthony,

Ok, before I start, this post is an end-to-end explanation of X and the
stuff that sits on top of it.  If you don't want your intelligence
insulted, please switch off now.  Of course, if anything I've written is
inaccurate or wrong, I'd like feedback. 

On Wed, 7 Jul 1999, Anthony Ison wrote:

> I'm reasonably new to Linux and to the whole X vs Windoze & Gnome vs KDE
> thing.
> Can someone please explain the difference between KDE and Gnome?  I have
> seen a heap of stuff about GTK and Enlightenment also....  I'm not really
> sure what other terms are floating around, but what the heck does it all
> mean????

You'll probably realise that the X Window System is the windowing system
for UNIX (and other platforms like VMS).  Rather than being built into the
guts of the operating system, like recent versions of Linux, X sits on top
of UNIX.  X is different from most other windowing systems in that it's
network transparent - it's possible to run applications remotely and
interact with them on a seperate machine.  The program that actaully does
the drawing and I/O stuff is called the X server[1] and the programs that
run under X are called clients[1]. 

X is also different in that X itself is not responsible for decorating and
managing windows.  Under X, a special client called a "window manager"
does this job.  Naturally, you can only run one window manager at a time. 
Enlightenment, Window Maker and fvwm are all examples of window managers. 

X does not know about controls/widgets like scrollbars and buttons on the
screen either - it only knows about things like drawing lines and boxes
and passing events around: it's the client program's responsibility to
work out how to draw the various user-interface elements on the screen. 
Since it'd be a huge pain in the backside for every singe programmer to
write code to draw her buttons and scrollbars for each program she writes,
you can get libraries that do all this for you.  Examples are Motif, GTK+,
Qt, etc.

Now X by itself is not terribly friendly for your average non-specialist
computer user, so people have gotten together to form groups to write
user-friendly shells on top of X, to try and take the sting out of using
UNIX (for newbies not used to command lines anyway[0]).  A bunch of people
(a lot of them Europeans) started writing KDE[2] to accomplish this.
Programs written especially for KDE should (must?) use the Qt[3] widget
library - which upset many Free Software types because Qt was not released
under a Free licence[4].  A bunch of other users decided to act, and
formed another group to create another user-friendly environment called
GNOME[5], which is based entirely on Free software (including the GTK+
widget libraries).  GNOME uses Enlightenment as it's window manager,
although you can use others - that's the beauty of UNIX in general, and X
in particular.  GNOME is arguably prettier (and more bloated) than KDE,
but KDE, having such a big headstart on GNOME is a bit more mature and
stable.  Both environments have many applications written for them too, so
the lack-of-end-user-application problem is becoming much less of an issue
nowadays.

Anyhow, I hope this description clears things up for you and others.

- warmest regards,

Ben.

[0] Please don't flame me, I don't want another CLI-vs-GUI flamewar :)

[1] At first appearences this might seem odd, but that's just the way the
    standards refer to the bits and pieces of X.  If you like, X programs
    ("clients") contact an X display ("server") to make use of display
    services.

[2] http://www.kde.org/

[3] Qt is written by Troll Tech: check out their web page at
    http://www.troll.no/.  Previous versions of Qt were released under
    a non-Free license, but I believe that this has been rectified with
    Qt v2.0.

[4] Go to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ to learn more about Free Software
    licensing.

[5] http://www.gnome.org/

--
 Ben Fowler, 3rd Year BInfTech(CompSci, DataCommunications), QUT.
   e-mail:       ben.fowler at humbug.org.au  b1.fowler at student.qut.edu.au 
   vanity page:  http://azure.humbug.org.au/~zuul/ 

 "Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant." -- Unknown


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