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Does anyone know what's the actual difference between a window manager (WM) and a desktop environment (DE)? What makes XFCE and ROX-desktop DE's while a pretty featureful window manager like Window Maker is just WM? I mean, Window Maker has a GUI config tool and wterm, and with dockapps and other extensions one can add many extra features to Window Maker, like its own sound server and WmShutdown to shutdown or reboot your computer. But still Window Maker is considered just a WM. Why is that?
Has this WM/DE sepatation got something to do with session management? Or maybe it's something in the way that XFCE and ROX (and KDE and Gnome) control the behaviour of the root window (or "desktop")? I've seen in several documents the note that it's important to separate WM's from DE's but they never seem to offer the criteria for this distinction. Please enlighten me.