So, I was told you can take any distro, pair it with any desktop environment, and badda bing, badda boom, unique linux in the room!
And a few years ago I tried getting into linux, and it didn't work. I didn't like ubuntu. I want something that's basically like Windows 98.
Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. Well, I had some issue with one program, and I'm an idiot on linux. Have no clue what I'm doing. So the guides tell me to update the thing. So I do that, and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!
I never got it to start working again, and I just said screw it, I'm not dealing with this. Put it in a drawer, and haven't touched it in about a year.
Well, now I'm think I'll just start fresh. Install a new distro, and since Ubuntu seems to be the one with the most support, I'll use that. Then I find out that LXDE visually is more in line with what I want.
So I figure I'll slap on ubuntu, slap on LXDE, and then install retropie. And hopefully the fan will work again. So I start researching this LXDE, and the home page wants you to download the desktop environment already baked into a DIFFERENT distro! Wait, hold on. Am I wrong in thinging you can just download a desktop environment, and slap it on any distro? Because it might be me. I have no clue what I'm doing. And even though this is lemmy, when I searched for "Ubuntu Help", there's no community named that. There's also no community named "Linux help". Which I find very very odd. Lemmy of all places you'd think would have a linux help community! This place loves linux. Does everyone just always know what they're doing at all all times? Or am I just going crazy? I feel like I'm walking blind into a forest and bear traps line the ground. I have no idea how to even start this process....
Think of it this way
There's your core of the system, the kernel part. It's the engine of the thing but basically its the package manager. This is what Ubuntu, Redhat, Arch, etc is. It's all interchangeable in some ways and also locked into a specific place you get your packages and updates. It could be any desktop and all of the desktop environments or just a command line.
So more often than not, the core will favor a specific desktop environment. You can always install multiple environments and they'll work but there's some things that are suited for one desktop environment over the other. Many of the basic apps don't work outside their environments. KDE apps don't always work in Gnome and vis versa.
So when you download Ubuntu, your basically says give me the package manager that points to the Ubuntu repositories that will understand your version of the core and give you prepackaged software that is meant to work with Gnome.
If you go with Kubuntu you'll get the same treatment but with the KDE desktop environment and all of its basic stuff.
But you can install KDE on Ubuntu and you can install Gnome on Kubuntu.
You can mix and match all the desktops if you want but at some point it does cause problems because the developers make different decisions and use different software that you're package manager has to deal with.
So some distros do things different, have different configurations and package managers. I use Arch which uses pacman (package manager) to give you core software that they keep up-to-date and test but it's limited in what it offers. So instead it has an AUR that can be accessed though many different sub package managers, like yay
I could go on but I hope this makes a little sense about the difference in distribution and desktop environments.
If you want a Windows 98 style desktop, look at KDE. It's a lot like how Windows works