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Can someone tell me what exactly is GTK, Genome shell, and unity in between all of those.

I might sound stupid but can someone tell me how to take advantage of any of these I am using and which one am I using.

Currently using ubuntu 13.10

Thanks in advace,

Quantum

Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
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1 Answers1

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What is GTK

At its simplest level - GTK is a graphical toolkit i.e. a series of libraries and a known Application Programming Interface (API) to allow developers to create applications using these predefined libraries of code.

By using such a toolkit, applications have a consistent look and feel - various graphical components will behave in a similar manner

Gnome-Shell & Unity

At their simplest level - Gnome-Shell & Unity are similarly an "application" that uses GTK to give them their look-and-feel.

I'm being highly simplistic - Gnome-Shell & Unity are complex beasts using many programming technologies, window managers etc. They are in-fact many-many individual "applications" pulled together to provide a User Interface you interact with.

I'm counting here scripts of various sorts (python/bash etc), individual applications built in C/C++/Python/Javascript etc etc.

Conclusions

You dont need to do anything to "take advantage" unless you are yourself an aspiring developer - you just need to be aware of the underlying technologies - GTK is just one of many.

Resources:

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