noob requesting a bit of explanation ...

From: Martin Slaney (slaz_at_dsl.pipex.com)
Date: 04/01/04 

Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 02:01:46 +0100

Here's hoping someone might a couple of minutes to explain this ...

I'm primarily a Windows user ... (well -its the means by which I make a
crust :-) ) - starting to quite like Suse (I have 8.2 nicely installed
on a spare box) - after several brief, minor flirtations with Linux over
the years - but one thing _really_ confuses me still .... and I suspect
quite a few others.

Could someone - in a few sentences - very broadly describe how the
(apparent) multiple "layers" of GUI work in Linux ? I mean what really
is Xfree86 ? What are KDE, Gnome ? Window managers ? How do these layers
   work/relate to each other ? Which of them is a subset of "X-windows" ?
Where do the h/w specific device drivers "plug in" to ? How specific are
these layers to the different Linux distro's ? Could you please use
"brand name" examples ?

I've had a quick google, but its hard to know what to search on <g>.

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