On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:15:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[1] I don't even know what the fuck to call any of them anymore. "Window manager", "Desktop Environment", "Shell", "Compositor", and if I'm not mistaken there's even some damn hybrids or some such, and some can be used together, some can't, bleh.
A window manager handles window bar controls, positions of new windows, and the like. A shell is merely a term for something that allows input to the OS. A compositor takes the pixels pushed by other parts of the stack and applies GL magic to them. A Desktop Environment takes several of the above and packs them together in a single environment to create something (hopefully) cohesive.
They're all the same damn things as far as I can tell :/
That's because you don't know what you're talking about. :P
