Desktop Environments

Other Desktop Environments

Both Gnome and KDE are full flagged Desktop Environment for *Nix systems. Apart from these two there are a lot of other Desktop Environments & Windows Manager that are used with different type of *Nix System, most notable among is Xfce. Xfce is a very lightweight DE and popular too.

Here we will discuss some of them:

Xfce(Complete DE)

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX platforms. It is similar to the commercial CDE, and is now based on the GTK+ toolkit.

A strong point of Xfce is its ease of configuration - it is driven entirely by the mouse. The latest version features drag and drop, session management, translations for numerous languages, including support for multi-byte character sets, and numerous other features.

The desktop environment includes a window manager, called XFwm, the main panel, a file manager, a backdrop manager, a sound manager, a calendar, a pager module, and a GNOME compliance module.

CDE (Common Desktop Environment)

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a commercial graphical user interface for UNIX in its various flavors (AIX, Digital UNIX, HP/UX, Solaris, UnixWare, etc.). The desktop has been jointly developed by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems. It has been adopted as a standard operating environment by these companies and many others in the UNIX workstation market.

The CDE incorporates the dtwm window manager. This is a Motif-compliant, virtual window manager and is similar to the HP/UX program vue.

Other Desktop Environments

* EDE: The Equinox Desktop Environment is small desktop environment built to be simple and fast. It is based on a modified FLTK library.

* FVWM-Crystal: A desktop environment built around the FVWM window manager, ROX-Filer file manager, and others.

* Athene Desktop: A commerical desktop with its own graphics server, although it can also display X11 applications for compatibility. A free download edition is available.

* Metisse: An experimental X desktop which uses a virtual X server, a special version of Fvwm, and OpenGL support to implement various window effects, including rotation, scaling, and blending.

* JD4X: The Java Desktop for X aims to provide a Java based desktop that can run both Java and native applications. It is initially only availabe for Linux x86 platforms.

* 3D-Desktop: An OpenGL program for switching virtual desktops in a seamless 3-dimensional manner on Linux.

* XD640: A simple graphical desktop environment for X designed for small screens and slow processors. * XPde: A Windows XP-like desktop environment designed for Windows users migrating to Linux.

* ROX: An attempt to bring some of the good features from RISC OS to Unix and Linux. It includes a desktop environment based around a file manager.

* Flowe Desktop: A commerical desktop environment for Linux. This has now been bought by SlickEdit Inc, although no release is currently available.

* 5dwm: The Indigo Magic Desktop for Linux.

* foXdesktop: An attempt to create a new desktop environment based on FOX (an LGPL widget set). It is currently in an early state of development.

* UDE: Unix Desktop Environment - early stages of a new window manager written using only XLib, rather than special GUI libraries.

* EDE: the Equinox Desktop Environment. This is the beginnings of a small, fast, low memory environment, based on the Fast Light Toolkit. * The GREAT Desktop, free for Linux (statically linked with Motif).