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X-windows
Linux runs what is known as X-windows. This is the grandaddy of all windows enviornment. The historical story I heard was Xerox (hence the X) was developing the windows concept. The guys from Apple Computer visited them during development and got a copy of the software or at least the concept. While Apple was developing their own version, Billy Gates crew hijacked a copy during a visit for porting applications from DOS to Apple's OS. Low and behold Windows 286 is introduced and the rest is history. Well almost. Xerox as a result of all the hijacking, decided to take X-windows off there product development, and put it into the public domain.

The group at Xfree86.org ported X-windows for the Intel 80x86 platforms. This is the version that is used over Linux. As far as I can see it does everything the bootlegged versions do. Its well documented, easier to use, more consistant and more stable.

There are a number of window managers that can be layered on top of X-windows. A popular combination is Enlightenment and Gnome. Elightenment provides an intermediate layer to allow window managers to be switched on the fly with fully cusomized setups for each user of the computer. Another popular window manager is KDE. There are several good ham applications written using KDE interface. With Enlightenment, I could switch between KDE and Gnome if I wanted to go that route.