Figure 1-3. GNOME panel menu
Along with the menu in the top panel, there is a dock along the left side. The dock
includes commonly used applications like the Terminal, Firefox, Metasploit, Armit‐
age,
Burp Suite, Leafpad, and Files. The dock is similar to the dock in macOS. Click‐
ing one of the icons once launches the application. The options in the dock to start
with also show up as favorites in the menu accessible from the panel. Any program
that is not in the dock will be added to the dock while it is running. Again, this is the
same behavior as in macOS. Whereas Windows has a taskbar that includes buttons
for
running applications, and also has a quick launch bar where you can pin applica‐
tion icons, the purpose of the dock in macOS and GNOME is to store the application
shortcuts. Additionally, the Windows taskbar stretches the width of the screen. The
dock in GNOME and macOS is only as wide as it needs to be to store the icons that
have been set to persist there, plus the ones for running applications.
The dock in macOS comes from the
interface in the NeXTSTEP
operating system, which was designed for the NeXT Computer.
This is the computer Steve Jobs formed a company to design and
build after he was forced out of Apple in the 1980s. Many of the
elements of the NeXTSTEP user interface (UI) were incorporated
into the macOS UI when Apple bought NeXT. Incidentally, NeXT‐
STEP was built over the
top of a BSD operating system, which is
why macOS has Unix under the hood if you open a terminal
window.
Desktops | 11
Logging In Through the Desktop Manager
Although GNOME is the default desktop
environment, others are available without
much effort. If you have multiple
desktop environments installed, you will be able to
select one in the display manager when you log in. First, you need to enter your user‐
name so the system can identify the default environment you have configured. This
may be the last one you logged into.
Figure 1-4
shows environments that I can select
from on one of my Kali Linux systems.
Figure 1-4. Desktop selection at login
There have been numerous display managers over the years. Initially,
the login screen
was something the X window manager provided, but other display managers have
been developed, expanding the capabilities. One of the advantages of LightDM is that
it’s considered lightweight. This may be especially relevant
if you are working on a
system with fewer resources such as memory and processor.
Xfce Desktop
One desktop environment that has been somewhat popular as an alternative over the
years is Xfce. One of the reasons it has been popular is that it was designed to be fairly
lightweight for a full desktop environment and, as a result, more responsive. Many
hardcore Linux users I have known over the years have gravitated to Xfce as their pre‐
ferred environment, if they needed a desktop environment. Again, the reason is that
it has a simple design that is highly configurable. In
Figure 1-5
, you can see a basic
setup of Xfce. The panel on the bottom of the desktop is entirely configurable. You
can change where it’s located and how it behaves, and add or remove items as you see
fit, based on how you prefer to work. This panel includes
an applications menu that
includes all the same folders/categories that are in the GNOME menu.
