WIndow Managers - What are they anyway???

Over at lifehacker, they recently wrote a good article on Window Managers for Linux.  If you are new to Linux and are confused by the window managers available, I would recommend reading this article.


Here's a snippet:

What Are Window Managers and Desktop Environments?

While Windows and Mac OS X were designed around a GUI and, for the most part, are fixed to that specific GUI, Linux's GUI is completely separate from the operating system itself. It's split up into a few different parts: atop the command-line operating system is the X window system, which is what draws the GUI onto your screen. On top of that is what's called your window manager, which allows you to (surprise, surprise) manage the windows on your screen: move them around, drag and drop files, scroll up and down, and so on.

You can get a usable GUI with just a window manager, though it's fairly minimal. You usually won't have any panels, taskbars, or a ton of menus to work with, so there's a bit of a learning curve. It may work for low-powered machines, but more often, people use a window manager coupled with a desktop environment, which lets you choose between different taskbars or docks, customize the appearance of your system, and tweak settings through the GUI. Popular examples of desktop environments are GNOME (which comes bundled with a window manager called Metacity, though many others are available) and KDE (which comes with its own, KDE-specific KWin window manager).

Seem overwhelming? It's definitely a different experience than Windows and Mac OS X provide, where you just install the OS and go. What's really cool, though, is that because there are so many different desktop environments, you can fully customize your experience by finding the right one for you. That is, if you have, say, an older machine, you can run a window manager by itself, or find a less less resource-intensive desktop environment. On the other hand, if you want a window manager that gives you lots of eye candy or configurable options, you can do that too.

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