Comparison of X Window System desktop environments

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A desktop environment is a collection of software designed to give functionality and a certain look and feel to an operating system.

This article applies to Linux and other operating systems which run X Window System desktop environments. Windows does not come with a choice of desktop environments, although independent desktop shell replacements exist to provide some of the same functionality.

1 Choosing a desktop environment
2 Default programs packaged with desktop environments
3 See also
4 External Links

[edit] Choosing a desktop environment

To operate a Linux desktop, requires at the least, compatibility with X, the desktop framework, and installation of the appropriate software libraries, such as Qt or GTK. Since X is universal, and multiple types of libraries can be installed, in practice software for most major desktops can be run under any desktop manager chosen - although running a package designed for one desktop within a different desktop can be visually anomalous. Some of the differences influencing a choice are therefore:

Look and feel available with the given desktop manager
Flexibility and configurability requirements
Personal software preferences (eg file manager, browser, word processor) to be run, since it is generally pleasing to obtain a consistent look and feel of programs under the chosen desktop manager.
Default software available with the chosen system, for ease of installation and maintenance.

[edit] Default programs packaged with desktop environments

This table shows basic information on the default programs of some desktop environments for the X Window System:

	GNOME	KDE	Xfce	LXDE	ROX Desktop	EDE
X window manager	Metacity	KWin	Xfwm4	IceWM	OroboROX	edewm
File manager	Nautilus	Konqueror	Xffm/Thunar	PCManFM	ROX Filer
Widget toolkit	GTK+	Qt	GTK+	GTK+	GTK+	eFLTK
Terminal emulator	GNOME Terminal	Konsole	Terminal		ROXTerm
Text editor	gedit	Kate	Mousepad		Edit
Video player	Totem	Kaffeine	Xfmedia		mplayer-rox
Audio player	Rhythmbox	Amarok	Xfmedia	LXMusic	MusicBox
CD burners	GnomeBaker	K3b	Xfburn		RoxISO
CD ripper	Sound Juicer	Konqueror	GRip (de facto)		Ripper
Image viewer	Eye of GNOME	KView	GQView (de facto)		Picky
Office suite	GNOME Office	KOffice	OpenOffice.org (de facto) ¹		none
Web browser	Epiphany	Konqueror	Mozilla Firefox (de facto)		none	Mozilla
E-mail client	Novell Evolution	KMail	Mozilla Thunderbird (de facto)		none

^1:On low-end hardware, or when better performance is desired (as with the Xubuntu distribution), Abiword and Gnumeric are used instead of OpenOffice.