In general there are two flavors of X desktop. The two most well-known "heavyweight" desktop projects are GNOME and KDE; these include both a desktop environment and an application development framework. A desktop environment includes a window manager, help browser, file manager, task bar, and so on. A development framework includes any number of libraries to ease application development, perhaps most importantly a GUI toolkit. GNOME and KDE are the desktops with the most support from Linux distribution vendors.

The second flavor of X desktop includes a desktop environment only; no development framework is included. The line between this flavor of desktop and a plain old window manager is a bit blurry; many people would describe Xfce, and WindowMaker as desktops in this category.

The following is a very incomplete list of available desktop environments which make use of freedesktop.org standards.

Full desktop environments

• Cinnamon: A variant of GNOME with a more 'traditional' interface
• Elementary: Elementary OS
• Enlightenment
• GNOME (developer site)
• GNUstep: The GNU OpenStep Implementation
• KDE (developer site)
• LxDE: provide a new desktop environment which is lightweight and fast
• Unity: A desktop environment built on GNOME
• Xfce: Lightweight GTK+-based environment

Light desktop environments

Many of these desktop environments take a 'mix and match' approach, where you assemble your own desktop from a set of components.

• awesome: Highly configurable, next generation framework window manager
• fluxbox: Lightweight WM with support for tabs
• FVWM: An extremely customizable window manager and some desktop applications
• IceWM: Window manager designed to be small, fast and lightweight
• WindowMaker: Window manager intended to work with GNUstep