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
First, a history lesson:
AT&T made an operating system called UNIX. AT&T had a monopoly on the phone system, so the US government split them into many companies. Each company took UNIX and continued with on their own, so there were many versions of UNIX. These companies then licensed it to other companies and Universities and it became a big old mess. See the UNIX family tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File:Unix_history-simple.svg. Through the 70s, 80s and 90s a lot of high end computers and servers used some form of UNIX.
UNIX was expensive, so there were several groups working independently to creating a free version of UNIX. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) thought the first thing that should be done was a C complier and the command line tools. So they started working on that.
About 5 years later Linux Torvalds came along and wanted a free version of UNIX too. He thought he should start with the Kernel (the part of the OS that talks to the hardware). He named his kernel Linux.
Other people came along and saw all these parts and said there is enough here for a complete operating system. Lets bundle them all together and make an OS. Many people have done this including Slackware, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Redhat, etc. These are called Linux Distributions, or Distros for short. There were lots of arguments about the name, should it really be called Linux when that is only a small part of the entire system.
Then people wanted a Graphical User Interface for the OS. MIT started the XWindow System, which again there were many versions of, the one most Linux users used at the time was XFree86. But XWindows was very basic, and this was about the time Windoows 95 was getting popular and people on Linux wanted a better GUI. They wanted it to be more like Windows with all the standard tools built in.
So a group called KDE started a ‘desktop environment’. This would be everything people expected from a modern OS. A web browser, a media player, a calculator, a work processor. All the stuff people now expected to come with an OS. However, MS Windows was moving fast and they needed to catch up. They figured they didn’t have to to write it all themselves, so they based KDE on Qt, commercial software they could use without cost, but wasn’t free-software/open-source.
There were another group of Linux users who found this unacceptable. Commercial software should not be required to use Linux. So they started another Desktop Environment called Gnome. It was a duplication of all the stuff in KDE.
So when you picked a Linux distribution you had to pick between KDE which had more stuff and Gnome which had more freedom.
Now Qt is free software (LGPL or commercial license) and Gnome has all the stuff. I’m not really up to date on KDE vs Gnome anymore. Pick one, they are pretty much equivalent. That’s pretty much the story of Linux, there are multiple of everything, pick one and get on with things. Heck, you don’t even need to use Linux anymore, FSF has their own Kernel now (HURD) so you can run Debian Hurd.
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