Hari's Corner

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What defines a desktop system?

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 10:14 IST (last updated: Tue, Dec 10, 2013 @ 10:18 IST)

There are so many debates on the Internet about "Linux on the Desktop" or "BSD on the Desktop" that a lot of people seem to hide behind vague statements like "no two people are agreed on what a desktop actually is" or that the concept of a desktop is too vague to define for most people. Yet others prefer to club desktops with window managers (which are mere graphical workspaces, as opposed to text consoles).

Often the debate is blurred between what desktop users actually do, and what a desktop system is supposed to provide, which causes immense conflict in debates. To my mind, they are two different topics. A desktop system should provide a basic environment which makes it easy for desktop users to use their applications without too much system level configuration, manually having to tie together various components which make the system and/or having to use disparate paradigms to achieve one task (i.e. manually editing configuration files for some services and using GUI tools for others).

I think that a desktop environment or a desktop OS should provide, minimally at least the following services:

Note that in the above, I don't include 2D or 3D video hardware acceleration, which depends on hardware drivers, and which is not strictly necessary for desktop usage, although some of the functionality of the desktop may be affected by the lack of it (for instance media playback, video gaming and also visual frills like desktop compositing). I've also not included software management, which depends on the OS in question, though GUI software management makes life easier for desktop users.

I consider the above as necessary components of any modern desktop system and I'm sure a lot of desktop users would tick off at least some of the above components as being necessary. People who use plain Window Managers on UNIX-like OSes aren't necessarily desktop users. They are simply running GUI applications in a graphical workspace. Graphical interfaces may be used in a workstation or sometimes even on a server, but they are not desktop systems in the sense I've mentioned above.

I think most debates about desktop usage should have a clear frame of reference of what a desktop computer is supposed to provide as a bare minimum, as opposed to what desktop users want to do, which is a whole different topic.

2 comment(s)

  1. That's an interesting division - especially as back when KDE decided to do their rebranding they created three software aspects of their DE:

    - KDE Framework: a set of technologies and infrastructure to provide OS integration and build further complex software
    - KDE Applications: all of the basic application you expect to have
    - KDE Workspaces: a consistent defined UI

    I guess the KDE folks got things right?

    Comment by Dion Moult (visitor) on Wed, Dec 11, 2013 @ 07:59 IST #

  2. - KDE Framework: a set of technologies and infrastructure to provide OS integration and build further complex software
    - KDE Applications: all of the basic application you expect to have
    - KDE Workspaces: a consistent defined UI


    I think KDE always got it right, Dion. And even though I think KDE 3.5.x series was the ideal combination of usability and features, KDE 4 is also there. However, I found some aspects of KDE 4 annoying and so switched to Xfce 4 and then back to Gnome 3.

    Comment by Hari (blog owner) on Wed, Dec 11, 2013 @ 12:35 IST #

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