Two terminal windows side by side in Sway, a window manager
In October 2010, Canonical released Ubuntu 10.10 and introduced Unity, a desktop that turned everything upside down and forced many to do what is known as “distro hopping”, basically changing the operating system from time to time to find what will be their preferred distribution. Years later they went back to GNOME, the desktop he uses today.
Unity and GNOME are two desktops, and the desktops use window managers, and since there are operating systems that go beyond the former and work directly with the latter, there are users who get lost, get confused and don't know what role each one plays and in what are they different Here we will try to explain, briefly and concisely, what is a window manager, what is a desktop and how are they different.
What is a Window Manager?
A window manager is software in charge of displaying the different programs that we execute on a graphical interface, but only that. It is not responsible for managing the networks to which we are connected, nor for viewing our files or being able to increase the sound volume. Desktops use window managers, but window managers don't use desktops. By itself, using a window manager would be practically impossible to use, unless you are a Linux veteran and know how to do everything from the terminal.
For this reason, operating systems that only use a window manager (no desktop) also use packages to be able to manage things like volume, network connections, and sometimes they have a kind of launcher, from which we can open programs or , sometimes an app drawer. But all these are additions; window managers, as we have mentioned, are solely and exclusively responsible for manage the windows…. hence its name.
And a Desk?
We could refer to a very technical definition, but what it would cause is more confusion. Simplifying things a lot, a desktop is a set of applications, applets, programs and all kinds of software that are put together to simplify the use of an operating system on a PC. Thus, on a desktop we not only find a window manager that manages the graphic interface, but we also find a network manager, and audio with its corresponding volume indicator. We also have quick access to our files through a file manager, etc…. The difference is that while a window manager is one part, the desktop is a set of programs intended to provide functionality.
Why do we think it is essential to know this? Because there are many who talk about window managers as if they were desktops and then find that nothing can be done. Also, knowing it allows us to be able to play with the system so that we can install Ubuntu and change the graphical interface of GNOME by an i3wm or Sway (window managers) greatly accelerating the system and maintaining desktop programs such as Nautilus or network-manager.
There is variety among desks and some are well known as KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXQt o Cinnamon. Looking back in time, Unity has been a desktop and window manager horse. In a first instance it was a window manager that was used on top of GNOME, but version after version they modified it to such an extent that today it is already considered a desktop.
Among the best known window managers are i3wm, Sway, Fluxbox, Openbox, Metacity or Icewm among others.
If someone who is reading us has been able to investigate and install several versions of Ubuntu, they will have realized that there are distributions called Xubuntu, Kubuntu or Lubuntu. Good, all of them are ubuntu, but with different desks. So, Xubuntu is Ubuntu with the desktop Xfce, Kubuntu is with the desktop KDE and Lubuntu is with the desktop LXQt.
I hope I have explained well. On another occasion I will talk about window managers, a very interesting and very unknown topic. Greetings.