The most popular version of Linux Mint is the Cinnamon edition. Cinnamon is primarily developed for and by Linux Mint. It is slick, beautiful, and full of new features.
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment. It doesn’t support as many features as Cinnamon but it’s lighter on resource usage.
MATE is a classic desktop environment. It is the continuation of GNOME 2, which was Linux Mint’s default desktop between 2006 and 2011.