Leigh Dyer looks at the range of Linux desktops beyond GNOME and KDE.
Some time ago I looked at GNOME and KDE, discussing their origins and differences, and I got a lot of great feedback. In particular, many readers mentioned that they’d love to see some coverage of some of the less-known alternative desktops available. Indeed, many new Linux users probably don’t understand just how extensively you can customise the Linux desktop, by swapping out the big-name desktop environments for something totally different.
With that in mind, here’s a look at some of my favourite alternative desktops for Linux. They range from comprehensive to minimal, but they’re all great, and well worth a look if you want to try something new.
XFCE
In discussions of alternative desktops, XFCE is always one of the first names to come up, and with good reason. Although it’s lighter than GNOME or KDE, it’s still a mature, comprehensive desktop, making it easy for new users to pick up and learn. In the early days, XFCE was essentially an open-source, GTK-based clone of the commercial CDE desktop, but XFCE has built upon that base to become a superb, unique desktop in it’s own right.
The XFCE panel is clean and simple, and while it’s not quite as configurable as the GNOME panel, it’s still very flexible. I couldn’t find an easy way to add launcher icons for applications in the main menu (though manually configuring launchers isn’t tricky), but apart from that it was quite easy to use. There’s quite a range of applets that can be added to the panel, too.
The file manager, called Thunar, is a similarly simple affair. It uses a browser-style display, with breadcrumb navigation like that seen in Nautilus on GNOME, or Windows Explorer on Vista. Wisely, XFCE works with the file type handling system established by GNOME and KDE, so you shouldn’t run into any surprise file associations when double-clicking on icons. Thunar also integrates well with the desktop, and handles removable media.
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| XFCE provides a clean, simple environment with built-in compositing support. |
XFCE also has built-in support for display compositing: it’s an option that you can enable through the “Window Manager Tweaks” options. This gives you subtle soft window shadows, and true transparency support in applications like the XFCE panel and terminal emulator. XFCE also encludes its own themes and icon set, which ensures that it looks and feels unique, even though it shares its toolkit with GNOME.
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| Thunar handles file management quite nicely. |
Even with the desktop effects enabled, XFCE is very quick. My test system is no slouch (it’s a Core 2 Duo E6300 with 2GB of RAM), but XFCE did seem to respond just a touch more quickly than GNOME or KDE (I didn’t do any definitive testing). I’d say the developers are doing well with their goal of building a comprehensive desktop that’s lighter than GNOME or KDE.
E17
It sounds like a boy band, but it’s really a window manager called Enlightenment. When I started using Linux back in 1998, Enlightenment 0.14 was a killer app: its visual effects and customisability were legendary. Enlightenment 0.15 soon followed, becoming a popular window manager for use with GNOME. By about 2000 Enlightenment 0.16 had arrived, which moved towards being a light but more full-featured desktop.
Work started on Enlightenment 0.17 soon after, with all sorts of vague promises about revolutionising the desktop, and an endless stream of new libraries and foundation classes showing up in CVS. Since then, E17 has gone through countless re-writes in the quest for perfection, but it’s never reached an official release, making it the butt of many Duke Nukem Forever jokes.
It looks like it might be getting somewhere though, with a series of “0.16.999” pre-releases showcasing something that seems to realise at least some of the early promises. It still has some impressive eye-candy too, even if projects like Compiz and Beryl have raised the bar with their OpenGL-powered effects.
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| E17 has basic file management, easy configuration, and its own GUI toolkit. |
The bling kicks in as soon as you start E17, with an animated intro that plays while it loads. Once the desktop is revealed, it’s quite minimal, with just a bar down the bottom similar to the XFCE panel. The bling comes back as soon as you open the menus though, with lots of shiny animations as you navigate. Window title bars are similarly animated when a window gets focus. My favourite eye-candy though is the desktop transitions: you can assign separate background images to each virtual desktop, and this triggers transition animations that play when you switch between desktops.
The visual effects are powered by Evas, a canvas library designed for Enlightenment and related applications. It has a number of backend renderers, including highly-optimised pure software backend, an X Render extension-based backend, and an experimental OpenGL backend.
For a project that’s still deep in development, E17 is surprisingly mature - you could start using it today. For instance, it already has a basic, but usable, integrated file manager. Configuration is also well handled, with a very comprehensive set of configuration dialogs. All the components use a custom GUI toolkit, but this too seems slick and mature. The thought and effort that the developers have put into the fundamental platform, before working on Enlightenment itself, is clear. In fact, desktop utilities based on the Enlightenment libraries have already started to appear.
There are still some rough edges, particularly in the file manager, but it looks like this latest incarnation of E17 might finally make the leap from development project to released product. If and when that happens, I’ll be sure to take another look and let you know how it turned out.