Most desktop environments have their own APIs. Most are written in different languages. However some share parts. KDE uses its own and is written in Qt. But Cinnamon and GNOME Shell will share some because both are built from GNOME and are written in GTK3. The difference is that Mint has forked Cinnamon and added their own coding to the work of the GNOME Project. You can do this in open source as part of its licensing. The window manager has also been forked.
This is gross generalization, but basically what you see before the login screen is the work of the Linux Foundation and GNU. However each distro will choose how to implement them and which ones to use. For example one distro could use GRUB while another could select LILO. They can choose different parts and leave out some in order to enhance boot speed etc.
Once you get to user space things change a bit. Many distros will use systemd to start the user space initialization. Right now most distros use Xorg but that will soon change as some are moving to Wayland and Ubuntu is moving to Mir as a display server. Then things really diverge. The window manager is usually quite specific to a desktop environment or ones based on it, but even then you can have a different window manager with the same DE. For example you could change from Kwin or Mutter to Compiz.
This makes answering the question very difficult. Lots of the same APIs early on and then things get tricky. Stock KDE and stock GNOME have their own of everything and share nothing after login. Unity has some bits of GNOME still because both are written in GTK and they only re-invent what they need. Mint is somewhere between Ubuntu and GNOME now that they have Cinnamon and Mate.
If you install a KDE application such as K3b in a GNOME based distro then it will need to install a bunch of KDE base files to get it to work in GNOME. The opposite is also true. You can have several window managers installed at once and use them interchangeably if you know how to switch them back and forth. The sky is the limit.
As said at the beginning this is a simplification. Since it is open source developers can take what is available and do some ingenious things to mix and match.
Roy
On Wednesday, July 9, 2014 1:57:44 AM, "'S.P. Maiorca' s.patrick.maiorca@gmail.com [LINUX_Newbies]" <LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
On 07/07/2014 07:22 AM, Linux Canuck linuxcanuck@yahoo.ca
[LINUX_Newbies] wrote:
> Mint uses GNOME as its basis. Yes, it uses the Linux kernel or it
> would not be Linux. Mint with Mate uses GNOME 2.x and adds some
> ingenious coding to make it work on a GNOME 3 base
hi
Figured that is what you meant- I've normally used K but now I am
switching to cinnamon.
One thing that has been a bit unclear to me is how much do the API"s
differ in the desktops?
-SPM
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Posted by: Linux Canuck <linuxcanuck@yahoo.ca>
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