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I want to detect which desktop manager I am running, and I found out that there are three environment variables, DESKTOP_SESSION , XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP , and XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP which could help me do so. But what exactly is the difference between these three variables? Thanks in advance.

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Old question, but still highly ranked on Google, so worth answering in 2021.

You want to use only the official $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP. Be careful that it is a colon-separated list (like $PATH), so don't assume it only contains a single value (even if it does in most DEs). If you prefer to handle a single value, use $XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP.

Official standards:

For more details, including a bash function to parse and test a desktop environment, see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/645761/4919

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I'm not sure what the official reasons are for having many different variables, most likely different window & display managers all do their own particular configurations.

But all of them look the same, so using any one should work...

Here's what Mint's XFCE has:

$ echo $DESKTOP_SESSION 
xfce
$ echo $XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP 
xfce
$ echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP 
XFCE

and also

$ echo $SESSION
xfce
$ echo $MDMSESSION 
xfce
$ echo $GDMSESSION 
xfce

Or (from env):

XDG_MENU_PREFIX=xfce-
UPSTART_JOB=startxfce4

Your best bet (if you've got wmctrl) may be this combined with grep/cut:

$ wmctrl -m
Name: Xfwm4
Class: xfwm4
PID: 5449
Window manager's "showing the desktop" mode: N/A

You can also be using a different Window Manager and Display Manager, and some different distributions store data in different places, so confusion reigns supreme. See these very related Q's:

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