Comparison of X Window System desktop environments

A desktop environment is a collection of software designed to give functionality and a certain look and feel to an operating system.

DEs usually provide utilities to set wallpapers and screensavers, display icons on the desktop, and perform some administrative tasks.

There are some exceptions: Window managers like Fluxbox, wmii and Ratpoison operate independently of a desktop environment and were written with this objective in mind.

Additional hand-picked applications add functionality such as a panel and volume management which gives them some of the qualities of a full DE.

[4] This usually means that virtually every component of the desktop environment including the file manager explicitly depends on that library for its functioning.

For software developers, the Portland Project has released a set of common interfaces that allows applications to integrate across many desktop environments.

[30][31] In 2015, it was demonstrated in benchmarks that LXDE performed slightly faster than Xfce overall (in the average of all tests), using the Fedora Linux operating system.