Linux_User interface,CLI shells ,text-based user interfaces,userland,K Desktop Environment (KDE), GNOME, Cinnamon, Unity, LXDE, Pantheon and Xfce

The user interface, also known as the shell, is either a command-line interface (CLI), a graphical user interface (GUI), or through controls attached to the associated hardware, which is common for embedded systems. For desktop systems, the default mode is usually a graphical user interface, although the CLI is available through terminal emulator windows or on a separate virtual console.

CLI shells are the text-based user interfaces, which use text for both input and output. The dominant shell used in Linux is the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash), originally developed for the GNU project. Most low-level Linux components, including various parts of the userland, use the CLI exclusively. The CLI is particularly suited for automation of repetitive or delayed tasks, and provides very simple inter-process communication.

On desktop systems, the most popular user interfaces are the GUI shells, packaged together with extensive desktop environments, such as the K Desktop Environment (KDE), GNOME, Cinnamon, Unity, LXDE, Pantheon and Xfce, though a variety of additional user interfaces exist. Most popular user interfaces are based on the X Window System, often simply called "X". It provides network transparency and permits a graphical application running on one system to be displayed on another where a user may interact with the application; however, certain extensions of the X Window System are not capable of working over the network.Several popular X display servers exist, with the reference implementation, X.Org Server, being the most popular.

Different window managers exist for X11, including tiling, dynamic, stacking and compositing types. Simpler X window managers, such as FVWM, Enlightenment, and Window Maker, provide a minimalist functionality with respect to the desktop environments. A window manager provides a means to control the placement and appearance of individual application windows, and interacts with the X Window System. The desktop environments include window managers as part of their standard installations (Mutter for GNOME, KWin for KDE, Xfwm for xfce) although users may choose to use a different window manager if preferred.

Wayland is a display server protocol intended as a replacement for the aged X11 protocol; as of 2014, Wayland has not received wider adoption. Unlike X11, Wayland does not need an external window manager and compositing manager. Therefore, a Wayland compositor takes the role of the display server, window manager and compositing manager. Weston is the reference implementation of Wayland, while GNOME's Mutter and KDE's KWin are being ported to Wayland as standalone display servers instead of merely compositing window managers. Enlightenment has already been successfully ported to Wayland since version 19.

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