EXPLAIN: What’s the Difference Between a Window Manager and a Desktop Environment?
To answer this question, it might be useful to think of the entire user interface as a stack of layers. At the bottom of the stack we have the computer’s hardware such as the monitor and keyboard. At the top of the stack we have the beautiful desktop that the user interacts with and in the middle we have the real workhorse.
The bottom stack is the X-System (sometimes simply called X). X is an application that sits above the hardware, but below the window manager. X does all the talking to the hardware. The window manager (or indeed the end user) need not be aware of what X is doing. It quietly and invisibly takes care of the nitty-gritty hardware interaction.
The middle stack is the window manager (like Fluxbox, IceWM, and BlackBox) that sits between X and the desktop environment. A window manager is responsible for individual windows only. It is not responsible for any type of interaction between multiple windows on a desktop. Therefore, the window manager displays the window and perhaps puts the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on it and does things like controlling which window is ‘on top’ as well as a myriad of other tasks.
The desktop environment (like KDE and Gnome) sits on top of the stack (or arguably between the window manager and the user). One of the tasks of a desktop environment is to provide the interaction between multiple windows on a desktop. Things like cutting and pasting from one window to another are the responsibility of the desktop environment, not the window manager. Additionally, desktop environments generally come with flashy things like wallpapers, screensavers, and a suite of applications.
So, in short, as a desktop user you will spend most of your time interacting with your desktop environment while X and your window manager quietly work their magic in the background.
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