Innovative desktop environment

Surprising Shell

Article from Issue 236/2020
Author(s):

Offering a lean desktop, theShell demonstrates what an easy-to-use interface can look like if you think beyond outdated conventions.

No other operating system offers such a multitude of desktop environments as Linux. However, many of these user interfaces are very similar: MATE, Xfce, LXDE, and Trinity are based on similar ideas; their differences relate more to appearance and (under the hood) resource requirements.

Resource-friendly work environments, on the other hand, often deviate so greatly from modern approaches that they require a longer period of acclimatization. In addition, they often appear visually antiquated. Enter theShell [1]. If you are thinking it is just a lean desktop, you may be surprised that it does many things differently.

Based on the Qt toolkit, theShell works with the KDE KWin window manager by default. You can find theShell's source code [2] on GitHub, which means that you can compile it on any distribution. For this purpose, the developers provide some basic documentation [3], which details the required dependencies among other things.

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