Desktop Environmen
The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until
the rise of mobile computing.
A desktop environment bundles together a variety of X clients to provide common graphical user interface elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpapers, and desktop
widgets. Additionally, most desktop environments include a set of integrated
applications and utilities. Most importantly, desktop environments provide their own window manager,
which can however usually be replaced with another compatible one .
The user is free to configure their GUI environment in any number of ways. Desktop environments simply provide a complete and convenient means of accomplishing this task.
Note that users are free to mix-and-match applications from multiple
desktop environments.
DE-provided applications tend to integrate better with their native environments. Superficially, mixing environments with
different widget toolkits will result in visual discrepancies (that is, interfaces will use
different icons and widget styles). In terms of user experience, mixed environments
may not behave similarly (e.g. single-clicking versus double-clicking icons; drag-and-drop functionality) potentially causing
confusion or unexpected behavior .