[CLUE-Tech] KDE/Gnome is crashing for no reason...

[mgushee at havenrock.com]

On 7 Mar 2003 at 8:42, Joe Linux wrote:

> I should point out that I run ICEwm.  Does that use QT?

Probably not. It didn't used to.

> I can run both 
> KDE and Gnome applications.

That means you have the KDE and GNOME libraries installed, which is 
in general a completely separate issue from which window manager you 
use.

Let's see if I can concisely express how this stuff fits together. 
KDE and GNOME (like MS Windows) are *desktop environments*. The main 
point of a desktop environment is to provide a desktop metaphor and a 
set of apps and utilities with a common look and feel. To that end, a 
desktop environment will be based on a particular GUI toolkit; KDE 
uses Qt and GNOME uses GTK+. What a GUI toolkit provides is mainly a 
set of widgets (buttons, text fields, scrollbars, etc.) and an event-
handling framework.

Now, as I understand it, the window manager is strictly speaking 
independent of all of the above--at least it is under X11, with its 
loosely-coupled client-server architecture. At the most basic level,
a window manager does just what its name says: manages windows. And 
the X11 idea of a window is independent of any GUI toolkit: it's 
really just an area of the screen allocated to a client application. 
You can see all this for yourself by running X with no desktop 
environment and no window manager. I'm not suggesting you'd want to 
do that on a regular basis (it's a very, well, Spartan interface), 
but it's an interesting experiment.

It may be, though, that certain window managers blur those 
distinctions a bit: they may be designed to exploit the features of a 
particular desktop environment, and they may include components such 
as menus or launchpads that depend on a particular GUI toolkit 
(strictly speaking, those may be client applications rather than 
parts of the window manager, but if you need them in order to run the 
window manager, the distinction is rather academic). That seems to be 
the case with kwm (or whatever KDE calls its default window manager 
these days), and perhaps with Sawfish also.

Hope that makes sense to you.

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO USA