funkajunk, 1 year ago

You pretty much got it, except for the fifth point.

A desktop environment (“DE”) is separate from the compositor (X11 or Wayland), but can’t exist without it.

At the end of the day, a DE is really just a “window manager” with a bunch of bundled applications, like taskbars/panels, a file manager, an app menu, etc. It’s as minimal or as feature rich as you want it to be.

The window manager dictates what to draw on the screen and where, but the compositor is what actually does the work. One is kind of useless without the other.

Hopefully that makes sense, I’m not a rocket surgeon.