The anatomy of a desktop
Your desktop is the virtual environment in which you work, and provides a friendlier user interface with which to interact with your PC. The desktop consists of a number of different elements to produce the working environment you know and love – or hate, if you’re switching.
The desktop typically contains icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers and – optionally – desktop widgets. Most of what you’ll see is provided by the window manager. As its name implies it determines how the desktop’s windowing system works by taking responsibility for the placement and appearance of windows and their component parts, such as menus, title bars and control buttons. The desktop’s graphical elements – buttons, scrollbars, icons etc – are stored in special libraries. These include the widget toolkit, which is also utilised by applications so they can work seamlessly with the desktop. Two main toolkits exist: Qt and GTK, and while you can run applications made in one toolkit on a desktop built using another, they don’t tend to look as good.
Many of these elements are stored in a theme, which makes it easy for users to change a desktop’s look and appearance by defining how key elements look in terms of shape, colour and other elements.
Desktops also ship with a number of core tools and utilities, designed specifically to work well with that environment. Typical elements include a file manager, image viewer, text editor and terminal emulator, as well as a tweak tool that allows various aspects of the desktop to be customised.