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Window Systems, Window Managers, Desktop Environments

If you’ve ever been confused when seeing names like “desktop environment” and “window manager,” this exerpt from A History of the GUI is a nice summary on it’s origins:

The initial design goal of the X Window System (which was invented at MIT in 1984) was merely to provide the framework for displaying multiple command shells and a clock on a single large workstation monitor. The philosophy of X was to “separate policy and mechanism” which meant that it would handle basic graphical and windowing requests, but left the overall look of the interface up to the individual program.

To provide a consistent interface, a second layer of code, called a “window manager” was required on top of the X Window server. The window manager handled the creation and manipulation of windows and window widgets, but was not a complete graphical user interface. Another layer was created on top of that, called a “desktop environment” or DE, and varied depending on the Unix vendor, so that Sun’s interface would look different from SGI’s. With the rise of free Unix clones such as Linux and FreeBSD in the early 90s, there came a demand for a free, open-sourced desktop environment. Two of the more prominent projects that satisfied this need were the KDE and GNOME efforts, which were started in 1996 and 1997 respectively.