I have been using Ubuntu for about a year now and I’m still a bit confused about how the desktop is setup. Is it just a window manager? Or is it just a full-blown desktop environment that uses Xephyr and the X Window System and it’s all self-hosted? I am not a native English speaker, so I am unsure if this is correct or not.
Ubuntu is a desktop environment, not a window manager. It’s basically a set of tools that allow users to interact with their computer, including the ability to run web sites and programs and even play games. A desktop is a graphical user interface that runs on top of a system’s kernel.
There is no doubt that Xephyr is a full-blown desktop environment, but I’m not sure if Ubuntu is one.
The Xephyr desktop is a window manager that uses X as its primary interface and runs on top of X11. The Xephyr project was founded by Steve Klabnik, a former employee of IBM who is now a developer on the X11 project. Xephyr was designed to be a lightweight and relatively easy to use desktop environment. I think the reason the Xephyr project was abandoned is because it was a bit of a nightmare to set up.
The Xephyr project is still around, and it still has a large amount of support from the X11 project. And today, the Xephyr project is still the only officially supported desktop environment for Linux, so Xephyr is still the most up-to-date version.
I think a lot of people are now asking themselves, how does the desktop project work in practice? If you wanted a lightweight and easy-to-use desktop environment for Linux, you obviously needed to support multiple platforms and multiple versions of the same toolkit. So you needed to have a different program for each different version of the toolkit. So the answer to that is that the Xephyr project was abandoned because it was a bit of a nightmare to set up.
It’s good to see that the Xephyr project has gone on to become more about the toolkit and less about the project itself. It’s a good reminder to always be on the lookout for other projects that you may be interested in adopting.
Xephyr was a project that I started back in 2010 because I was getting ready to go to university and wanted a way to make my own computers work on multiple platforms. So I wrote a program that would let me switch between my laptop and a desktop and even make my laptop desktop work on my desktop.
I think it’s great that Xephyr got a boost in popularity because it is a toolkit that could have been implemented on top of, and for some tasks on, almost anything. If you were looking to create a desktop that would also run on your laptop, you really should have looked into Xephyr.