What Desktop Environments Run on Linux?
Linux with XFree86 supports the KDE, GNOME, and commercial CDE desktopenvironments, and extended window managers like WindowMaker. Each uses
a different set of libraries and provides varying degrees of MS
Windows-like look and feel.
Information on KDE is available from http://www.kde.org/. The KDE
environment uses the Qt graphics libraries, available from
http://www.qt.org/. The desktop uses its own window manager, kwm, and
provides a MS Windows-like look and feel.
The GNOME home page is http://www.gnome.org/. The environment uses the
free GTK libraries, available from http://www.gtk.org/, and window
managers like Enlightenment, http://www.enlightenment.org/, SawFish,
http://www.sawfish.org/. There's also a Web page for GNOME
installation and upgrade that functions much like Debian's apt-get
utility with a friendly GUI front end. It's at:
http://www.helixcode/com/desktop/.
The commercial CDE environment uses the Motif libraries and a
variation of the Motif mwm window manager, dtwm, and provides a suite
of desktop and session-management utilities. Several vendors have made
the source code of Motif available and provided binary packages for
Linux distributions. As a starting point, download and installation
information is available at http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/.
A free version of Motif, called LessTiF, is available from
http://www.lesstif.org/.
WindowMaker, http://www.windowmaker.org/ is a window manager that has
many desktop environment-like features. It provides support for
GNUstep, http://www.gnustep.org/, a clone of the commercial NeXTStep
environment.
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