A [[desktop environment]] is a collection of software designed to give functionality and a certain [[look and feel]] to an [[operating system]].
This article applies to [[Operatingoperating system advocacy|operating systems]]s which are capable of running the [[X Window System]], mostly [[Unix]] and [[Unix-like]] operating systems such as [[Linux]], [[Minix]], [[illumos]], [[Solaris (operating system)|Solaris]], [[IBM AIX|AIX]], [[FreeBSD]] and [[Mac OS X]].<ref>[http://www.xfree86.org/ XFree86 Official Website] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20031020210433/http://xfree86.org/ |date=2003-10-20 }} line 5</ref> [[Microsoft Windows]] is incapable of natively running X applications; however, third-party X servers like [[Cygwin/X]], [[Hummingbird Ltd.|Exceed]], or [[Xming]] are available.<ref>[http://x.cygwin.com/ Cygwin/X website]</ref><ref>[http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming Xming project homepage on SourceForge]</ref>
