Unlike Microsoft Windows, in the Linux® world you can choose from a large and diverse variety of desktop environments, more than are listed here, with different design philosophies and levels of complexity. Your environment preference can be a factor in your choice of a Linux distribution.
Sometimes you have a full Linux desktop environment which includes an integrated window manager, file manager, and other resources. Sometimes a leaner package, which is essentially just a window manager, comes with a few other tools which enable it to function in the role of a desktop environment. And sometimes a lightweight desktop environment and a separate lightweight window manager are made to work together.
GNOME and KDE are the most widely used Linux desktop environments. Most desktop-oriented distros come with one or the other, or your choice of the two. Ubuntu, the most popular distribution, is available with GNOME, KDE, or Xfce, which is probably third in popularity among environments.
GNOME and KDE are based on different toolkit libraries, but you can choose one environment to run, and still use applications written for the other, if you install both libraries. The Ubuntu family has very nice support for installing and switching its supported desktop environments. Increasingly, however, applications are being written to be desktop-independent, such as The GIMP for raster graphics editing and the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, both of which can be run on GNOME, KDE, or even Microsoft Windows.
The GNOME project began in 1997, partly due to GNU project concerns about the licensing that existed then of the Qt toolkit KDE is based on. GNOME is based on the GTK+ toolkit. GNOME 1.0 was released in 1999.
The GNOME project seems to have a stronger focus on ease of use than KDE. Some people even seem to feel that GNOME's efforts toward ease of use have gone too far, to the point that it might be annoying for power users. They might even be right, from their viewpoint; but maybe that doesn't make the corporate sponsors wrong in seeking a very user-friendly form of Linux.
GNOME was endorsed by Sun and HP in August 2000, which some thought at the time might set off the Linux Desktop Wars, and there's still strong corporate participation in the GNOME Foundation, including IBM, Intel, Google, Nokia, and Motorola.
The KDE project was started in 1996, before GNOME, by Matthias Ettrich, then a German college student, partly because his girlfriend couldn't use Linux, the way it was then. KDE still has a strong user base in Germany. KDE releases can be categorized by version number hierarchy: platform releases (2.0) major releases (2.1) and maintenance releases (2.1.1). KDE 1.0 was released in 1998.
KDE is based on the Qt toolkit, and when KDE began, Qt did not use a free software license. By 2000 the licensing had changed enough to largely satisfy critics.
In 2005 Linus Torvalds, who started the whole Linux phenomenon, expressed a personal preference for KDE, and until recently it was supposed to have more users overall than GNOME. Lately there have been indications that GNOME may have passed KDE in popularity. This may be because more people who are not total propellerheads are using Ubuntu Linux with GNOME.
Many KDE applications have K in their name as an initial capital, a practice one reviewer described as "too Kute for words." KDE applications include the Konqueror Web browser and file manager/viewer, KOffice office suite (most people will probably prefer OpenOffice.org) Konversation IRC client, Konsole terminal emulator, Kate text editor, KDevelop IDE, and the Quanta Plus Web development tool.
Enlightenment or E is an innovative and highly configurable eye-candy desktop environment. Enlightenment is a reduced-footprint environment and will run on older hardware than GNOME and KDE, but is perhaps not as newbie-friendly or always as stable as GNOME/KDE/Xfce.
Screen shots of E in action are quite striking and worth a look; or for a donation you can get the Elive Debian-based installable LiveCD distribution, and play with E in functional form without committing to installing anything. You can also run E with Puppy Linux.
User-friendly but lighter environments.
Xfce, LXDE, and ROX Desktop are all based on the same GTK+ toolkit as GNOME, so if you see a widget you like in a GNOME distro, you should be able to grab it and run it with no toolkit issues.
Very lightweight, but maybe not as newbie-friendly.
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