Hi,
I have used XFCE and Gnome versions of Kali without any issues. They install and work fine.
I recently tried both Kali 2016.2 Mate and Kali 2017 W13 Mate, but both boot into a command prompt login (showing runlevel 5) and then when I use "startx" to boot into GUI mode the networking is not working. I have to "service networking start" and "dhclient eth0" to get it going. I fully upgraded the system hoping that would fix an issue, but still boots into a command prompt and after started networking isn't started. When I look at dmesg, I do not see anything that would indicate an issue.
I am using VMware Workstation Pro 12.5 on a Dell XPS 13. I have installed a lot of distros and haven't had an issue like this. Not sure what is going on.
Thanks,
Shawn