Terminal and all that other shit, I follow you. Command lines. Fine. I don’t know what the Linux terms mean, but I understand command lines etc… But GNOME… what the fuck is it? Is it a suite? an environment? Every Linux user explains things like I’ve already been a user for a few years and all of them have forgotten what being NEW actually is.
Ironically, the WORST place to find Linux environments explained simply and clearly from the bottom up: The Internet.
This is where I remind and beg: Like. I’m. FIVE.
In: 81
Linux as an operating system is fully functional from the terminal. As in, you could boot up your PC and be greeted by nothing more than a command line, from which you would use commands to navigate folders, list files, install/remove programs, execute them, etc. You said you understood what a command line is.
At its core, that is the OS more or less. You log into your user account and start using your computer. However, some of us prefer to have a grapical user environment for this. In Windows, the graphical user environment is more unitary and starts with your operating system by default. Not so on Linux. Here you have a choice of multiple kinds of graphical user interfaces.
Some of them are simpler. We have that’s called a Window Managers(or wm) that simply manage how your graphical windows are displayed. That’s all it is, you open a program with a graphical user interface and the WM just helps you position it on screen.
Others are more complex, like Desktop Environments(DE). GNOME is one such DE. Desktop Environments do the job of several pieces of software, all in one. It does the job of display manager(which handles the graphical session), window manager, graphical compositor(that handles frame composition and animations), all of this at once to bring what you know as a desktop to life(Basically the space where you have your background wallpaper, open windows and can move them around, your taskbar, your status bar, application drawer, etc).
In addition to all this, Desktop Environments also contain a suite of other applications and utilities to create this desktop experience. A network manager for example, a utility to display and change desktop settings, a taskbar, a notification center, a utility to change volume, enable bluetooth connectivity, basic text editing apps and terminal emulators, image viewers, video players, etc.
GNOME is basically a combination of many pieces of software that enables the graphical usage of a Linux operating system. There are many such Desktop Environments, such as KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE and others. And they all do the things I enumerated, albeit in slightly different ways, with different apps.
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