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Unix offers more variety and choice when it comes to Desktop environments than any other Operational platform. This is due to Unix’s age, and it’s popular open source form of distribution. For new users, finally having variety of choice in their life can lead to an existential crisis. Suddenly, they no longer know who they are, and what it means to be “themselves”. Eventually, they will migrate to being a nomad of desktop environments, changing their environment once or twice a week for years. This form of migratory existence is quite detrimental to the maturation of budding script kiddies. So it is for this reason we shall put forth a light and incomprehensive list of Desktop Environments.
Before we begin our journey we must clarify something. For the purposes of this wiki entry we shall refer to both desktop environments and window managers as desktop environments. In reality, there is a difference between a desktop environment and a window manager, just as there is a difference between a central processing unit and a computer. Window managers refer to software the manages rendering of windows/screens, where desktop environments refer to homogenous working environment that window managers make up a part of.
(Which will more than likely never fully reach anything close to resembling comprehensivity.)
For our fucking fantastic table of Desktop Environments we will:
Name | Sausages | DE or WM | Difficulty | Skills Needed | Friendly | Weight | Graphics | Reccommend |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Gnome | Too Many | DE | Easy | None | Very | Heavy | Kuddos | It’s alright |
KDE | Abundant | DE | Harder than Gnome | None | Very | Heavy | It’s got some | Usable |
XFCE | Good Portioning | DE | Easy | None, besides it exists. | Very | Moderately | less than 2 above | Sure. |
lxqt | Sparse | DE | Should be no problem | None | Easy going | Reasonable | less is more | Yeah |
Enlightenment | Minimal | DE | Not really | Little | Cool Beans | Moderately | Hell, Yeah. Shazam! | Definitely |
i3 | none | WM | Medium Rare | Sh, and config files | Just Right | light | Minimal | We use it, so there. |
bspwm | Sausages exist? | WM | Hard | Sh & Bash | Not really | Lighter than air | With effort | Promising |
xmonad | Does not compute | WM | Use at own risk! | Ability to program Haskell well. | This WM hates you. | lite, but not light | There are rumors | Not unless your a masochist. |
AwesomeWM | Not a trace | WM | Medium - Hard | Create the config file | Done it, didn’t cry. | Reasonably Light | Minimal | Could be fun for pros |
Do not quote me on this, because I am no authority on the matter. After the occurrence of an issue with
getting GTK settings to apply to the menu bar of Sublime Text I learned about the role of the X settings
daemon. As it turns out, not all applications take their values directly from configuration files, some take
their values from an intermediary daemon. As anyone can guess, this intermediary daemon is referred to as the
“X Setting Daemon.” Each of the major desktop environments possess their own flavor of the xsettings daemon,
but all serve the same purpose of reading configuration varables from various files and providing those
variables to the requesting program. It does need it’s own configuration file available, ~/.xsettingsd
, but
what that configuration file is actually used for, is currently a mystery. As our local copy is completely
empty.
If you are like me, and do not run one of the big name desktop environments. The universal xsettings daemon is “xsettingsd”. Install it and create a blank configuration file, and your off to the races.