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  1. Desktops and Window Managers for all ages and skillsets
    1. Our Fucking Fantastic table of Desktop Environments
    2. Xsettings Daemon
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Desktops and Window Managers for all ages and skillsets

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.

Our Fucking Fantastic table of Desktop Environments

(Which will more than likely never fully reach anything close to resembling comprehensivity.)

For our fucking fantastic table of Desktop Environments we will:

  • Define whether it is a Desktop Environment or a Window Manager.
  • Whether it includes Sausages.
  • Difficulty of setup.
  • Skills needed for Setup.
  • User Friendliness.
  • Weight, referring to size and load.
  • Graphics, referring to visual appeal
  • Whether we reccommend or not.
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

FreeDesktop.org Spec Supported

Here is a list of desktop environments that are recognized as to following the freedesktop.org specification:

OnlyShowIn Value Environment COSMIC COSMIC Desktop GNOME GNOME Desktop GNOME-Classic GNOME Classic Desktop GNOME-Flashback GNOME Flashback Desktop KDE KDE Desktop LXDE LXDE Desktop LXQt LXQt Desktop MATE MATÉ Desktop Razor Razor-qt Desktop ROX ROX Desktop TDE Trinity Desktop Unity Unity Shell XFCE XFCE Desktop EDE EDE Desktop Cinnamon Cinnamon Desktop Pantheon Pantheon Desktop DDE Deepin Desktop Endless Endless OS desktop Old Legacy menu systems

Xsettings Daemon

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.