“Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME offer a popular
interface to computing. Unfortunately they are also often heavy on
resource usage. By contrast, the Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE)
is the fastest desktop environment I know of–but its lack of
standards support and a few missing features may be troubling to
some users.“The boundaries between desktop environments and window managers
are often blurred. No window manager by itself offers the things
included in a run-of-the-mill point-and-click environment: a
desktop with icons, a task bar that shows the running programs and
a system tray…”