Cinnamon (desktop environment)Cinnamon is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and Unix-like operating systems, deriving from GNOME 3 but following traditional desktop metaphor conventions. The development of Cinnamon began by the Linux Mint team as a reaction to the April 2011 release of GNOME 3 in which the conventional desktop metaphor of GNOME 2 was abandoned in favor of GNOME Shell. Following several attempts to extend GNOME 3 such that it would suit the Linux Mint design goals, the Mint developers forked several GNOME 3 components to build an independent desktop environment.
Linux MintLinux Mint is a community-driven Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which is in turn based on Debian), bundled with a variety of free and open-source applications. It can provide full out-of-the-box multimedia support for those who choose to include proprietary software such as multimedia codecs. Compared to Ubuntu, it uses a different Cinnamon interface by default, using a different, more traditional layout that can be customized by dragging the applets and creating panels. New applets can also be downloaded.
GTKGTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the Wayland and X11 windowing systems. The GTK team releases new versions on a regular basis. GTK 4 and GTK 3 are maintained, while GTK 2 is end-of-life. GTK1 is independently maintained by the CinePaint project.
Budgie (desktop environment)Budgie is an independent, free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems that targets the desktop metaphor. Budgie is developed by the Buddies of Budgie organization, which is composed of a team of contributors from Linux distributions such as Fedora, Debian, and Arch Linux. Its design emphasizes simplicity, minimalism, and elegance, while providing the means to extend or customize the desktop in various ways.
Wayland (protocol)Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager. Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg as a free and open-source community-driven project with the aim of replacing the X Window System with a modern, secure, and simpler windowing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Arch LinuxArch Linux (ɑːrtʃ) is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling-release model. The default installation is a minimal base system, configured by the user to only add what is purposely required. Pacman, a package manager written specifically for Arch Linux, is used to install, remove and update software packages.
Compositing window managerA compositing manager, or compositor, is software that provides applications with an off-screen buffer for each window. The compositing manager composites the window buffers into an image representing the screen and writes the result into the display memory. A compositing window manager is a window manager that is also a compositing manager. Compositing managers may perform additional processing on buffered windows, applying 2D and 3D animated effects such as blending, fading, , rotation, duplication, bending and contortion, shuffling, blurring, redirecting applications, and translating windows into one of a number of displays and virtual desktops.
GNOMEGNOME (ɡə'noʊm,_'noʊm), originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Many major Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora Linux, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise distribute GNOME as their default desktop environment; it is also the default in Oracle Solaris, a Unix operating system. GNOME is developed by the GNOME Project, which is composed of both volunteers and paid contributors, the largest corporate contributor being Red Hat.
Tiling window managerIn computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach (used by stacking window managers) of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor. The first Xerox Star system (released in 1981) tiled application windows, but allowed dialogs and property windows to overlap. Later, Xerox PARC also developed CEDAR (released in 1982), the first windowing system using a tiled window manager.
Desktop environmentIn computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until the rise of mobile computing. Desktop GUIs help the user to easily access and edit files, while they usually do not provide access to all of the features found in the underlying operating system.
