Archy (formerly The Humane Environment, THE) is an operating system (OS), scalable interface for computers of many types, and a text editor. Coded in the Python programming language, it has many ergonomically determined productivity and usability advantages over conventional Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) using Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pull down menus (WIMP). The ideas behind Archy are the result of decades of research, study, and thought, fully explained in a book about human interface design, The Humane Interface, by famous Apple Computer interface pioneer, original creator of the Macintosh, Jef Raskin. He originally led the project, but tragically died of pancreatic cancer, at age 61, 9 March 1943 - 26 February 2005, a Saturday. He died peacefully at home, surrounded by loved ones. Archy is partly open source, with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. Some are confused about whether Archy is an OS, or an editor. It is both. One way to view it is that Archy is an OS that provides editing services to all programs, as Pick is an OS that provides database services to all programs. OSs provide many services: consistent hardware access for programs; multiplexing hardware resources between processes, programs, users; application programming (or protocol) interface (API); memory and storage allocation; scheduling.

CDE stands for Common Desktop Environment. It is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS. It was the "classic" Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. After a long history as proprietary software, it was released as free software on 6 August 2012, under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2 or later.

GEM stands for Graphical Environment Manager, a windowing environment created by Digital Research, the same firm known for creating DR-DOS. Runs on DOS (16- & 32-bit Intel x86), and on 16-bit Atari ST/STE/TT (Motorola 680x0). Now licensed under the GPL.

GNOME is a graphical environment for the Linux operating system. "GNOME stands for GNU Network Object Model Environment. The GNOME project intends to build a complete, user-friendly desktop based entirely on free software. GNOME is part of the GNU project, and it is free software compliant with the OpenSource(tm) definition. The desktop will consist of small utilities and larger applications which share a consistent look and feel. GNOME uses GTK+ as the GUI toolkit for all GNOME-compliant applications." www.gnome.org

This information was taken from the KDE FAQ. The K Desktop Environment, KDE, is a project begun by Matthias Ettrich in 1996. Its aim is to connect the power of Unix operating systems with the comfort of modern user interfaces; to bring Unix to the desktop! KDE is for all flavors of Unix. Most KDE developers use Linux, yet KDE runs smoothly on a wide range of systems. Some systems on which KDE runs: Linux
MkLinux
LinuxPPC
FreeBSD
OpenBSD
IRIX
HP-UX
Solaris

Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris, and BSD. Xfce is based on the GTK+ 2 toolkit and uses the Xfwm window manager,