What is difference between distro and desktop environment?
 

It seems like programs are written for the desktop environment like Konquer, even though I am using KUbuntu. What is the Ubuntu doing and what is the KDE doing?

Thanks!

Your distro will configure the desktop environment for a certain look and provide scripts to maintain it, such as installing packages and configuring the computer.
It will also supply security updates so you don't need to track and patch applications yourself.

KDE is what you see as the graphical user interface for example in windows the desktop environment is explorer.exe now if you ended that task you could still do stuff. KDE is what is called a shell it goes over top of the kernel to provide a GUI
Hopefully you know understand

Hrmmm...

The distro (operating system?) doesn't depend on the desktop to be functional, yet the desktop DOES depend on the distro (operating system) to be functional...it's a "if all flargs are beeks, and all beeks are borks, are all borks flargs?" kinda question. The answer is "no"...the desktop and distro are not the same thing, and even though one depends on the other, the reverse is not true (unless you use Windows, in which case all borks are flargs =)

Distribution = the "brand name" of the overall system
Desktop Environment = the collection of tools and configuration that define how the GUI interface looks and operates. Desktop environments include KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and several others.

Konquerer is a file manager/web browser

Programs written for Linux will mostly run in any desktop environment. The one which are written for--eg--KDE will run in Gnome as long as the right libraries are loaded. (and vice-versa)

My take: the distro is the Linux kernel plus the full set of applications that the distro maintainer has put together to provide a fully functional system. The desktop (KDE, Gnome, etc) is basically the set of applications that make up the GUI.