A GdkWindow is a (usually) rectangular region on the screen. It's a low-level object, used to implement high-level objects such as GtkWidget and GtkWindow on the GTK+ level. A GtkWindow is a toplevel window, the thing a user might think of as a "window" with a titlebar and so on; a GtkWindow may contain many GdkWindows. For example, each GtkButton has a GdkWindow associated with it.