Desktop Environment - History and Common Use

History and Common Use

Further information: History of the graphical user interface

The first desktop environment was by Xerox and was sold with the Xerox Alto in the 1970s. The Alto was generally considered by Xerox to be a personal office computer; it failed in the marketplace because of poor marketing and a very high price tag. With the Lisa, Apple introduced a desktop environment on an affordable personal computer, which also failed in the market.

On commercial personal computers the desktop metaphor was popularized among technical users by the original Macintosh from Apple in 1984, and among the general population by Windows 95 from Microsoft in 1995. As of 2011 the most popular desktop environments are their updated versions in Windows XP and Windows 7, followed by the desktop environment of Mac OS X. When compared with desktop environments for Linux, the ones included with these operating systems are relatively unalterable.

Although, with the exception of Macs, which are shipped with Mac OS X, personal computers using Linux and other Unix-like OSs are still much less common, in recent years there has been a growing market for low cost Linux PCs that use the X Window System. These machines support many X11-based desktop environments.