Raspbian comes with a desktop environment out-of-the-box, Bananian does not. The nice thing about Linux is there are many different desktops to choose from. It is generally a good idea to stick to the lightweight options since the Pi's do not have a lot of graphic rendering power and are basically lightweight computers. The following screenshot shows the LXDE desktop, popular for lightweight distributions.

Raspbian comes with LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment (the clue is in the name). This is a pretty popular option because it is a classic layout, quick, and familiar to users who are not used to Linux because of its very Windows 7-inspired look. There are alternatives, though—for example, XFCE.

XFCE, as you can see from the following screenshot, is quite a bit different from LXDE but both are very customizable. XFCE will be more familiar to users who have used Linux before or even Mac users because of the use of the doc and menus on the top of the screen.

The desktop environment really comes down to personal preference because it really doesn't add anything or take anything away; it's just a question of aesthetics. You can even install both and switch between the two to try them out. To install LXDE on the Bananian you will need to run:

apt-get install task-lxde-desktop

Once the installation is done, you will need to reboot but you will then be prompted with a login screen. From here you can open the application drawer in the bottom-left corner and launch a terminal to begin installing the software. To install XFCE on either operating system you will need to run the following command:

apt-get install xfce4-desktop

You will need to install the dependencies as well before this will work on Bananian because of the stripped down environment you have.