Sensucht94 So, if I understand correctly, you can run the most of desktops that come with this OS? Like KDE, Gnome, Xfce...
Or I'm wrong in concepts. I don't know if "desktop" it's the same that "desktop environment". I tried to mean the last.
Sorry if I make you confused.
Oh, I see ahahah. yes,
'desktop computer', or simply '
desktop'; actually means a static personal computer meant for
'desktop usage', as opposed to
'workstation' and
Server. So basically, when you say 'desktop', it's a PC which isn't a laptop.
DE, (ex. GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, Lumina, CDE, KDE), is instead a full and complete GUI environment, which in Unix-like systems runs on top of a
Windowing system, in particular a X implementation (namely Xorg...XQuartz on macOS, Mir as Canonical's alternative for Ubuntu 18.04, rio on Plan9/9front, Wayland on Fedora), and iusually includes its own
Window Manager (= WM), a composite manager, a bar/panel, a settings daemon, a file manager, a terminal and some more stuff.
Many user just like to install a
standalone Window manager, often lighter than those which come with DEs, and only add few more things, in order to optimize performance (particularly on older hardware). Some others also like to take a WM, then add a panel, composite manager, a popup notification manager, a system tray, a wallpaper handler, a launcher, their preferred apps, etc.. so as to get a more customized desktop experience in return. Moreover, many window manager allow tiling windows: they are studied to be mostly managed by keyboard bindings and to optimize available display space; those are usually the preferred ones by developers and power users. Some represent a hybrid compromise between tiling+keyboard-input and floating/stacking + mouse,point&click input, as they allow both approaches: those ones are usually also the haeviest WMs (i3-gaps, awesome). As you should have guessed DEs all typically use a stacking/floating windows + point&click interface setup: this is usually more user-friendly and also similar to Windows'. Personally I like lightweight stacking WMs
Currently running
FLWM, quite the uncommon and niche one, which is
Tiny Core Linux' default. Rxvt-Unicode+perl extensions is my terminal, xosview, xclock and dmenu (launcher) are start-up apps. Using xbindkeys to handle shortcuts, and hsetroot to set the wallpaper
Different DEs/WMs do not affect programs, games etc..they're just comfortable and friendly user frontends for the Xorg instance running underneath, which in turns runs on top of your system. The different OS, the hardware specs, the available Xorg drivers are the factor which influence games availability.
Depending on your hardware though, performance might be negatively affected by heavier DEs (GNOME3 and KDE4/5) as they eat up a lot of RAM. On powerful hardware difference should pass mostly unnoticed