Comments on What desktop environment am I running?
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What desktop environment am I running?
I'm a complete beginner, and just installed Linux for the first time. I chose a popular distribution, but I've run into some issues, or have a few questions. However, I don't know if I have Gnome, Xfce, Cinnamon, Cosmic, or another desktop environment. How do I figure that out?
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By memory
If you installed Linux yourself, then you were almost certainly informed about this at some point in the process. Generally, you're either expected to choose a separate installer according to which desktop environment you want, or you don't get a choice and the desktop environment is just the one that your distro provides.
For example, when you go to any of the download or installation pages for Linux Mint (popular with beginners), you're expected to choose between the "Cinnamon edition", "Mate edition" and "XFCE edition" - those are named for the desktop environment they provide - or, in some cases, if you have newer hardware, the "Edge ISO" with a more recent Linux kernel. The Edge ISO uses Cinnamon and is described that way on the downloads page.
Of course, it's possible to install a different desktop environment later. But if you're in this position, you wouldn't need to ask the question.
From the command line
The inxi command can show a lot of information about how your system is configured:
inxi is a command line system information script built for console and IRC. It is also used a debugging tool for forum technical support to quickly ascertain users' system configurations and hardware. inxi shows system hardware, CPU, drivers, Xorg, Desktop, Kernel, gcc version(s), Processes, RAM usage, and a wide variety of other useful information.
Information about desktop environments is accessed using the -S (or --system) flag. Additional information is available with more flags, but this is already enough. Just use
inxi -S
and you should see a few lines of output that include your desktop environment, labelled as Desktop:.
Another option is to use a "fetch" program such as neofetch (you may have to install one first). Typically these display more neatly formatted information designed to fill one screen of terminal output, and might include a logo that represents your distro.
Finally (thanks to samcarter for the idea), desktop environments (or the corresponding window managers) might set environment variables that can be used to "fingerprint" them. In particular, many desktop environments support the "X Desktop Group" (XDG) standard, in which case you may be able to do a check like:
$ echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
X-Cinnamon
From your display manager's greeter
On typical setups, you'll have a graphical screen that you use to choose a user account and log in for a graphical session. This is implemented by a "greeter" program which is part of your system's display manager. For example, Linux Mint uses the LightDM display manager, and provides a custom slick-greeter for it.
Depending on what greeter you have, you may also be able to select a desktop environment, or a specific implementation of a desktop environment, before logging in. In the case of slick-greeter, for example, inside the small rounded rectangle that lists a username and provides a field to enter your password, at the top right, there is an icon which you can click to make this choice. With Cinnamon (only) installed, this will present a menu with the choice to use Cinnamon normally or with software rendering (and on newer versions, the experimental implementation on top of Wayland).
(Please keep in mind that trying to use the same user account with multiple desktop environments can cause problems, due to conflicts between config files.)
Other tools
Depending on your distro, you may also have GUI tools included that provide system information, including the name of the desktop environment. For example on Linux Mint, the "System Reports" program (also called mintReport) has a "System information" tab which you can click to see detailed system info (it grabs detailed output from inxi and displays it in a scrollable text panel). The "System" section of inxi output will be at the top, so you can read the desktop environment information immediately. There's also, separately, a "System Info" program that displays a different set of information, more directly; this also includes the desktop environment info.
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