Quote:
Originally Posted by plotino
thank you widget.
i have installed xfce on my existing install ..
at the moment im little bit confused about the meaning of
gdm3, dm, lightdm, gnome, gnome panel and xfce.
My understanding was
gnome and xfce are graphical user interface for linux
and i was supposing that gdm3 stand for gnome 3!
bu i m probably wrong .. can you help to clear the facts?
i dont know actually what dm was ..
plotino
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Ah, how complacent we become over time. Sorry for that.
There are a number of things that are needed to run a gui (Graphic User Interface). You are correct that Gnome Shell and Xfce are DEs (Desktop Environments) for Linux as is KDE used by Kubuntu.
gdm3, kdm, lightdm, xdm and so forth are display managers. gdm3 (Gnome Display Manager) is mainly seen by the user when it supplies you with the login screen.
On the subject of dms I am a bit confused in that you say you are running Kubuntu with Xfce added. While this is perfectly fine and fairly common thing to do KDE, the DE for Kubuntu generally runs kdm as the DM. Your mention of gdm3 has me somewhat bewildered just on that account.
Another thing I thought I understood was that all the "family" members of Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu and so forth) used lightdm as the default DM as it was developed for Ubuntu by devs at Canonical (company that puts out Ubuntu).
So I kind of wonder about those things.
The Gnome Shell interface is pretty new and replaced the long time look and feel of Gnome 2. Gnome 2 used panels similar to the Xfce panels and you can see this if you install a distro with Mate DE on it or install that on your current install too.
Mate is a fork of Gnome 2, brought up to date and with some improvements. This was done because Gnome Shell (the part of Gnome 3 you can see) is not as popular as the folks at Gnome would like. Ubuntu runs on Gnome 3 but doesn't use Gnome Shell but its own "shell" called Unity on top of the Gnome 3 backend. Currently neither are particularly popular although a lot of folks do like them.
My wife runs Mate on her Debian 7 (Wheezy) laptop which was switched to Debian when Ubuntu went with Unity. I showed her Unity, from a live CD, and her only comment was; "I don't want that shit on my desktop". One of those things you either love or hate.
We both ran Ubuntu for years. I ran Ubuntu testing as my production OS. There are people right now using Ubuntu 15.04 which is the current Ubuntu testing version.
I didn't like Unity in testing, I think Gnome Shell is slightly better and more usable but don't like it either. There is a real problem with the attitude of the people running Canonical and Ubuntu towards their users that also got very "old" to me so I quit using it and switched to Debian of which Ubuntu is a respin.
One reason I switched was the way the Ubuntu repos present DEs. This is why I asked how you installed Xfce. No matter what tool you use, and I am glad you used apt-get instead of the gui tools, you are always installing with apt-get. Synaptic package manager, Software Center and Update Mangler all are a bunch of scripts that run apt-get for you.
There are several types of packages. Ubuntu uses APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) for package management. This is the Debian package system. So all your packages have a suffix of .deb. These all include an install script which is read and followed by dpkg (what apt-get actually runs on and gives directions to) to install your packages.
One thing listed in that install script is a list of "depends" - packages that must be installed for the package you are installing to run correctly.
Some packages are called "meta packages". They don't actually have a package at all. All they have is a LOT of depends. When you installed Xfce you used one of that sort of package and it install hundreds of packages. Some of those packages were also meta packages.
Meta packages are very handy in that you don't have to type in all those packages by hand.
When I was running Ubuntu I ran Ubuntu. With Gnome 2. When you installed it the package that was installed, from the Ubuntu repos, for the DE was called "ubuntu-desktop" and contained Gnome and a selection of packages that Ubuntu thought were the best for the default install and all the artwork and so forth for that default Ubuntu look and feel of the desktop.
If you were adding Gnome to a Kubuntu or Xubuntu default install you could choose to use the other package that was available - "gnome-desktop". That meta package supplied Gnome 2 and a selection of applications and artwork that represented the selection that the Gnome Project people had chosen to be the best for the Gnome look and feel. This was a considerably smaller package than the ubuntu-desktop package and had quite different packages included.
Both worked fine. I got in the habit of doing a netinstall (no DE included so so you can add what you want later from the tty (black screen login) or a chroot from another existing install) of Ubuntu testing using the gnome-desktop package just to compare them.
This type of selection was also true for KDE and Xfce. You could choose the default kubuntu-desktop or the kde-desktop. The xubuntu-desktop or the xfce-desktop.
I think, if it is still available, that the xfce-desktop package, if it is still available and still the same as it was, is a much better choice but that is up to you as it is your box. I am simply currious as to which you installed if there was a choice at all.
People refer to xfce as a "lighter" DE and to a certain extent it is. Mainly they are not real concerned about eye candy because you can add that yourself. It does use somewhat less resources than Gnome or KDE.
Xubuntu is said, in the Ubuntu community, to be "light" also. I think it is different certainly and lighter than Kubuntu. It may be a bit "lighter" than Gnome but not much. It uses way too many Gnome packages to make it what it is. It is not a bad OS at all. It is based, mainly, on Xfce but doesn't really run like Xfce.
When I was looking for a new DE, when I decided it was time to move on from Gnome, I had one install (I am a multi booter that probably needs some sort of counsiling) that I installed a lot of DEs on. As it was Debian 6 (Squeeze) it was a base install of Gnome 2. So when I put on Xfce I was actually running something more similar to Xubuntu than to Debian installed with Xfce.
If you look at /usr/share/applications you should find, if you are running Kubuntu, a lot of KDE packages and problably more than one file browser supplied with KDE. You will also find Thunar the file manager for Xfce/. You will also find Nautilus the file manager for Gnome.
Why do you have that unless you install Ubuntu (Gnome based) in the first place? Because it is used by Xubuntu to control the functions of the bare desktop. Your icons for file systems and files and the trash bin and all that sort of thing. Under a purely Xfce install this is not how it works. Your destop in that case is controlled by xfwm, a Window Manager (wm).
Why does this matter? Your main configuration tool for Xfce is Settings Manager. If you try to use it to control the way the desktop looks like removing the shortcut for the file manager or trash or all those external drives you have running (I have a number of them) it will not work. You have to do that through Nautilus using Gnome tools. All that Gnome stuff added to do jobs that Xfce tools do is simply bloat in my opinion.
The advantage to doing it that way is that people switching from the default Ubuntu desktop, based on Gnome, have familiar tools to work with and don't need to learn much new stuff.
But if you are using Kubuntu what you are going to have is a complex learning curve because you are running a hybid install of Xfce and Gnome neither of which use KDE tools at all for configuration.
So I am just curious. Or nosey if you want to concider it that way.
Like most of us here I really was very green noob not that long ago and still am in a lot of ways.
