GNOME, KDE and Xfce are the most popular desktop environments for Linux. Most people end up using the default desktop environment that ships with their preferred Linux distribution.But experienced users prefer one over the year for either usability, performance, design or customizability considerations.hile KDE is one of them; GNOME is not. However, Linux Mint is available in versions where the default desktop is MATE (a fork of GNOME 2) or Cinnamon (a fork of GNOME 3). Defaults aside, both GNOME and KDE are supported by popular GNU/Linux and BSD distributions.