Template talk:Desktop environments and window managers for X11 and Wayland

organization of DEs and WMs in this template

Opening this discussion to head off revert war. The debate is "group them by size/'weight'" vs "alphabetical list". Discuss pros and cons… ⇔ ChristTrekker 15:43, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

BTW - Talk:Comparison of X window managers#Heavyweight.2FMiddleweight.2FLightweight covers a similar topic. ⇔ ChristTrekker 16:56, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Petchboo, your mass removals of this template from articles transcluding it the day after you "lost" your argument here is very poor form. I announced I am open to discussion of this issue, and will be requesting WP:3O to help resolve. ⇔ ChristTrekker 21:38, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Third opinion

Since it is openly admitted that classification by "weight" is arbitrary, subjective and lacking in sufficient sources, it seems like a very poor way to organize that is questionable and practically an invitation to disputes. If a broad agreement can be reached about what criteria to use for such a classification system and reputable sources found to provide the data for those criteria, it may be fine at that time to use the "weight" classifications. Until then, sorting by age, alphabetical order, or another uncontroversial and/or easily sources measure would be a good idea. Vassyana (talk) 15:04, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Not completely arbitrary and subjective in the general sense, only in specifics. Ask any 10 people familiar with the subject, and I'm willing to bet that 9 of them will agree that, broadly speaking, the classification is "accurate". Moreover, it is useful and informational, and age/alpha sorting aren't. I can deal with breaking some rules in order to make this encyclopedia better. All that said, my primary concern was the poor way in which agreement was being achieved—i.e. it wasn't. I am willing to discuss what the criteria should be, and to track down sources for that, and agree it would be an improvement if we did. But I don't think something useful should be thrown out in the interim just because we don't yet have it. ⇔ ChristTrekker 13:34, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree with ChristTrekker that it is useful to organize the desktop environments and window managers by "weight". I also think it is objective, as it can be measured by disk and memory usage. It is true that measuring it is unfortunately time-consuming, and worse, would be original research if we did it ourselves.

But even if we don't measure it, this fits general wisdom. Of the DEs, I know KDE, GNOME and Xfce. I doubt 3% of people who know all three would object that GNOME and KDE are roughly of similar weight, while XFCE is significantly more lightweight. Of the WMs, I know Enlightenment (which I use) and Fluxbox. Again, I doubt 3% of people would object that Enlightenment is more heavyweight than Fluxbox.

I think that references are essential to facts that may be the subject of dispute; I don't need a reference to say that most human beings have two legs.

Also, the number of DEs and WMs is high enough that an arbitrary classification by alphabetical order would be confusing and frankly absurd. A classification by age would be mildly useful, but I think that by weight is better. -- Jorge Peixoto (talk) 16:40, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

The number of DEs and WMs is less than the number of words in the english language, and alphabetization works well enough for dictionaries. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Petchboo (talk • contribs) 13:37, 2 September 2008

The difference is, the words of the English language have nothing otherwise in common that would lend to a better organizational system. There are qualities of DEs/WMs that can be measured/rated that do lend themselves to meaningful organization. Alphabetization is just as "arbitrary" as any other system, its only benefit being that it is "universal". A system germane/relevant to the subject matter seems, at least to me, an improvement over a generic system. ⇔ ChristTrekker 18:06, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

organization, again

Now that Petchboo has again reverted the sorting of this template to be simply alphabetization, I am reopening a RfC regarding the best way to organize it, vis a vis Vassyana's earlier Third Opinion. If you are interested, please add your two cents below. ⇔ ChristTrekker 20:11, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

OUTSIDE OPINION; PER REQUEST I'd have to agree with the alphabetical listing, at least for now. Classifying them is a great idea, but it can't be done arbitrarily. Wikipedia is supposed to be based off of existing classifications, not create them. Perhaps there is a facet of the design of these that can be used for classification? I'm not a Linux user, so I don't have a lot of in-depth knowledge about the architecture of X-window, but without some sourced method of classifying these, it should be left out. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 22:35, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

OUTSIDE OPINION; PER REQUEST Hm, very tricky indeed: separating by weight class would be more useful, but alphabetical less disputable. When I originally started writing this reply, I was thinking that I'd agree with the opinion that they should be alphabetized. However, the more I think about it, the more I think that categorizing by weight isn't quite as impossible of a task as I originally thought. I personally think a better "metric" for determining the weight of windows managers isn't memory usage, package size, lines of code, CPU, etc, but rather the goal or intent of the team or person developing the WM or DE. Thus, KDE, Gnome, and even Xfce all have the same goal: to present a seamless, user-friendly, graphical interface, in a way familiar to people switching from Mac or Windows. Similarly, Fluxbox and derivatives (my fave), Enlightenment (from what I've seen), FVWM, IceWM, all intend to be light-weight and minimalist, while still staying relatively accessible and aesthetic. Finally, WMs such as wmii, dwm, ratpoison, ion, evilwm, all try to take minimalism to an extreme, always sacrificing accessibility for minimization ("in order to keep the user base small and elitist", at least in the case of dwm). In this way, I think we can safely avoid arbitration and original research by instead using the author/community's own opinion on what the intent of the project. Also, another point I think is important, to reduce conflict, I think they should be in a rather non-granual -- that is, brutally sliced into 2 or 3 separate categories (Heavy, Medium, and Light, or perhaps better would be the more euphemistic: Complete, Light Weight, Minimalist?). Given the monumental number of WMs in existence, and the inevitability of more becoming notable, chopping it up slightly more than just DE and WM I think would be appropriate. Within each of these categories, they can be sorted alphabetically (since they would be roughly equal in weight -- we don't want to start a war over whether KDE or Gnome is more lightweight!). Just a few thoughts on the subject, I hope these were helpful! michaelb ^{Talk to this user} 03:56, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

The thing is, that's pretty much what I'd done. "Everybody knows" what the goals of the various DEs/WMs are, if only by the intentions stated in the Wikipedia article or on the homepage of the project itself. If I hadn't made it explicit before that this was my basis for categorization, I am doing so now. I think this approach makes sense and is perfectly reasonable, but evidently that is not good enough. ⇔ ChristTrekker 18:02, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Add Metacity to WMs

Shouldn't Metacity be part of the window managers? Currently it's part of the Gnome template but Gnome can use others window managers and Metacity can be used for other desktop environments.--azior (talk) 13:21, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

FVWM-Crystal

According to Gentoo's Portage, FVWM-Crystal is a WM theme rather than a DE.

x11-themes/fvwm-crystal
    Available versions:  3.0.5-r1 ~3.0.6-r1
    Homepage:            http://fvwm-crystal.org/
    Description:         Configurable and full featured theme for FVWM, with lots of transparency

What's more, the web site is dead.
Oh, and: http://starshine.org/xteddy/thomas/fvwm/fvwmchanfaq.html#c13
--Jerome Potts (talk) 17:25, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

MATE should be Full-featured DE?

Since MATE is a fork of GNOME, it should be on par with GNOME, I suppose.Dalcde (talk) 09:15, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Wayland

What does Wayland do in this template? Wayland is a new display system independent from X.Org. Do the function of mentioning Wayland is to show which of X.Org window managers are also Wayland compositors, or it's simply a mistake and misunderstanding, which should be removed? --Uniwersalista (talk) 13:25, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

See XWayland; there is no war between the X.Org Server and the Wayland developers. There is only the usual stupid Wikipedia shit, driven the usual suspects (very smart people). Thank you, that you did not remove the entries. User:ScotXW^t@lk 17:24, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

KDE

An umbrella term for KDE's desktop environment is no longer KDE SC; it's now called KDE Plasma Workspaces, or simply KDE Plasma. — Giorgi Gzirishvili (talk) 03:53, 4 March 2017 (UTC)