2.9 Desktop Environment

The environment is based on GNOME Xorg and Wayland for the following main reasons:

• Wayland is faster than Xorg
• Xorg is old but more stable than Wayland
• Wayland is more secure, since reduces the usage of root and isolating the input and output of every window

In general Wayland has drawbacks with respect to Xorg, for example it has compatibility issues with several elements whereas Xorg is much more stable. Currently, Athena implements also XWayland in order to execute also those applications that run only under Xorg.

In Athena, GNOME Classic has been removed by renaming the related files in /usr/share/wayland-sessions and /usr/share/xsessions. In this way, when the user reaches the Login Manager, only GNOME (Wayland) and GNOME Xorg will be shown.

Some elements in GNOME environment are defined and set in dconf-shell.ini file. This file not only maintain configuration settings of the used extensions, but it defines which of them must be enabled or disabled.

From ISO of Athena the gnome package has been removed for two reasons:

• Avoiding useless GNOME services and applications to be installed
• Conflicting among mutter packages

For this reason, only the minimal GNOME resources have been installed.