User Interfaces
X is primarily a protocol and graphics primitives definition and it deliberately contains no specification for application user interface design, such as button, menu, or window title bar styles. Instead, application software – such as window managers, GUI widget toolkits and desktop environments, or application-specific graphical user interfaces – define and provide such details. As a result, there is no typical X interface and several desktop environments have been popular among users.
A window manager controls the placement and appearance of application windows. This may result in desktop interfaces akin to those of Microsoft Windows or the Apple Macintosh (examples include Metacity in GNOME, KWin in KDE Software Compilation, Xfwm in Xfce, or Compiz) or have radically different controls (such as a tiling window manager, like wmii or Ratpoison). Some interfaces such as Sugar or Chrome OS eschew the desktop metaphor altogether, simplifying their interfaces for specialized applications. Window managers range in sophistication and complexity from the bare-bones (e.g., twm, the basic window manager supplied with X, or evilwm, an extremely light window manager) to the more comprehensive desktop environments such as Enlightenment and even to application-specific window managers for vertical markets such as point of sale.
Many users use X with a desktop environment, which, aside from the window manager, includes various applications using a consistent user interface. GNOME, KDE Software Compilation and Xfce are the most popular desktop environments. The Unix standard environment is the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). The freedesktop.org initiative addresses interoperability between desktops and the components needed for a competitive X desktop.
As X is responsible for keyboard and mouse interaction with graphical desktops, certain keyboard shortcuts have become associated with X. Control-Alt-Backspace typically terminates the currently running X session, while Control-Alt in conjunction with a function key switches to the associated virtual console. However, this detail is left to the design of an X server implementation and is not universal; for example, X server implementations for Windows and Macintosh typically do not provide these keyboard shortcuts.
Read more about this topic: X Servers
Famous quotes containing the word user:
“A worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)