Good day, I'd like to ask about the difference between desktop environments and windows managers. And what are the workings and reasons for so many choices.

I have just installed Mint KDE and compiz is faulty. Is there a winner Mint variety?

more or less: a windows manager is a program to handle your windows, to manage how should they appear, a desktop environment is a configuration, how should your windows look like, what kind of toolbars, menus, default apps you have ...

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Window Managers are simply for arranging windows. Desktop environments are full suites like KDE, GNOME and XFCE, that do much more than just arranging windows.

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Take a look at: http://xwinman.org/

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Desktop Environments give you a bunch of programs, GUI configuration tools, different services which all make DE like an OS on top of OS. Of course it works slower and less stable and just doesn't feel right overall. Window Manager just gives you windows and sometimes panel (like IceWM, but OpenBox doesn't). Plus some other tools to manage X.org windows, that's basicly it. You have to do all configurations of OS yourself using CLI and text config files. And also WM is configured with text configs which sometime is pretty difficult. If you wanna try a WM, check out IceWM first. It's very easy to configure compared to some other.

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