Desktop environment

A Desktop environment is a complete graphical user interface (GUI) solution. It provides icons, toolbars, applications, applets, and abilities like drag&drop. As a whole, the particularities of design and function of a desktop environment endow it with distinctive look and feel[?].

The term really only makes sense in the context of systems running the X Window System and/or UNIX, systems which have a GUI, but which may not have all the modern features mentioned above. One way to think of a desktop environment is as a set of tools that make UNIX and X act like the GUIs of Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh.

Well-known examples include GNOME, KDE, CDE and XFce; however, there are also a number of other desktop environments, including but not limited to EDE, UDE[?], ROX Desktop[?], GEM[?], PerlTop[?], XPde[?] and arm0nia[?].

Some window managers also include elements reminiscient of those found in desktop environments; the most prominent example for this is Enlightenment.

See also

• Window manager

External Links

• CDE (http://www.opengroup.org/cde/)
• GNOME (http://www.gnome.org/)
• KDE (http://www.kde.org/)
• XFce (http://www.xfce.org/)
• ROX Desktop (http://rox.sourceforge.net/)
• UDE (http://udeproject.sourceforge.net/)
• EDE (http://ede.sourceforge.net/)
• GEM (http://www.deltasoft.com/)
• PerlTop (http://perltop.sourceforge.net/)
• XPde (http://www.xpde.com/)
• arm0nia (http://arm0nia.org/)