Figure 1-5. Xfce desktop showing applications menu
While Xfce is based on the GNOME Toolkit (GTK), it is not a fork of GNOME. It was
developed on top of an older version of GTK. The intention was to create something
that was simpler than the direction GNOME was going in.
It was intended to be
lighter weight and, as a result, have better performance. The feeling was that the desk‐
top shouldn’t get in the way of the real work users want to do.
Cinnamon and MATE
Two other
desktops, Cinnamon and MATE, owe their origins to GNOME as well.
The Linux distribution, Linux Mint, wasn’t sure about GNOME 3 and its GNOME
shell, the desktop interface that came with it.
As a result, it developed
Cinnamon
,
which was initially just a shell sitting on top of GNOME. With the second version of
Cinnamon, it became a desktop environment in its own right. One of the advantages
to Cinnamon is that it bears a strong resemblance
to Windows in terms of where
things are located and how you get around. You can see that there is a Menu button at
the bottom left, much like the Windows button, as well
as a clock and other system
widgets at the right of the menu bar or panel. You can see the panel as well as the
menu in
Figure 1-6
. Again, the menu is just like the one you see in GNOME and
Xfce.
Desktops | 13
Figure 1-6. Cinnamon desktop with menu
As I’ve
suggested above, there were concerns about GNOME 3 and the change in the
look and behavior of the desktop. Some might say this was an understatement, and
the reversion of some distributions to other looks might be considered proof of that.
Regardless, Cinnamon was one response to GNOME 3 by creating a shell that sat on
top of the underlying GNOME 3 architecture.
MATE
,
on the other hand, is an out‐
right fork of GNOME 2. For anyone familiar with GNOME 2, MATE will seem famil‐
iar. It’s an implementation of the classic look of GNOME 2. You can see this running
on Kali in
Figure 1-7
. Again, the menu is shown so you can see that you will get the
same easy access to applications in all of the environments.
The choice of desktop environment is entirely personal.
One desktop that I have left
off here but that is still very much an option is the K Desktop Environment (KDE).
There are two reasons for this. The first is that I have always found KDE to be fairly
heavyweight, although this has evened out some with GNOME 3 and the many pack‐
ages it brings along with it. KDE never felt as quick as GNOME and certainly Xfce.
However, a lot of people like it. More particularly, one reason for omitting an image
of it is that it looks an awful lot like Cinnamon. One
of the objectives behind KDE
always seemed to be to clone the look and feel of Windows so users coming from that
platform would feel comfortable.
