Desktop Environments

Microsoft and Linux operating systems offer desktop environments which are Windows, for Microsoft’s O.S., KDE and GNOME for the Linux O.S. All of these desktop environments attempt to provide the user with an organized way to manage and interact with their programs, files, data and network. The desktop environments mentioned before all use the Graphical User Interfaces approach to display a window, with the ability to contain objects in the window. A window is a screen with borders; it’s used to interact with applications and programs running on the system. A window can be modified and managed by tools on graphical menus, icons or/and mouse/keyboard commands. With user interaction the window could be made to do common things like resizing, moving, and closing it. The desktop environments permit a common GUI to be used in most parts of applications such as window controls, menus, scrollbars, and file selections. Some desktop environments have a better ability for their GUI to stay relatively consistent between applications and on others it is easier to tailor the GUI to the user’s preference among application.

K Desktop Environment (KDE) is produced by a consortium of independent programmers based in Germany1. It is built with C++ programming language and uses Qt GUI tools and libraries. When KDE first came out in 1996 the Qt system was not part of the GPL open source licensing. In late 1998 the providers of the Qt GUI toolkit, Trolltech changed that by releasing Qt under a custom open source license. KDE is the exclusive desktop environment for Caldera and Corel, two major Linux distributors2.

1http://lists.isb.sdnpk.org/pipermail/plug-list/2001-September/0001 (unknown,01/28/2004)

2 http://www.developer.com/tech/article.php/62989 1(Compton,Jason, 01/28/2004)

Users of KDE have been known to comment that KDE resembles Microsoft’s windows the most out of the two Linux desktops, so for windows users changing to Linux, KDE should accommodate them best. Virtual desktops program is offered with KDE by default which lets a user run multiple programs concurrently in different desktops, up to eight. This could eliminate the task of minimizing and opening programs on just one desktop, instead you have a single program running on each desktop and it’s one click away. Applications that use Qt tools and libraries may run smoother and better on KDE than any other desktop environment. KDE is not well supported by Red Hat Linux, which prefers GNOME