Linux Desktop Environments System Usage

KDE and XFCE are my favorites. I could probably daily drive XFCE but with higher resolution (4K) monitors, KDE tends to look a lot better, at least in my experience. I loathe Gnome and don't really understand why it has become the default DE on so many platforms.

Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics. A unified clipboard (kb shortcuts as well as shared buffer), proper 4k rendering/scaling at a nuclear level, etc. This is my biggest gripe with Linux.

I would ditch macOS entirely if I could do the following: 1. complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere (there are hacks for this, but they are hacks), 2. proper 4k rendering (no blurry stuff) with consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications, 3. the ability to copy and paste text into or out of a terminal without fuss.

I don't care about X11 vs Wayland.

All this considered - and I can't believe I am about to say this - Windows 11 is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be and I kinda like it. Might need to go see a doctor I am starting to say funny things.

I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments.. If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? I can understand the idea of using memory used over time as a proxy for how featureful/bloated something is, but, blind monitoring of memory usage seems pointless to me. At best it can be a capacity metric - “if you have only 2 GiB of RAM on your machine, you’re better off with XFcE vs KDE, but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used?

Even if it's "bloated", I've found KDE to be a far more usable DE than Gnome. KDE provides you with more features than you need (or thought you might need), but everything's made discoverable, so you don't mind. Gnome relies on extensions to meet the bare minimum, and they break after each update. Once you add the extensions, I think Gnome ends up more bloated than KDE. Don't know about Xfce and the other stuff.

It's not an apples to apples comparison.

People forget that the entire early MacOs, GEOS, windows DE's used to run in a matter of a couple hundred K.

The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram, and yes it could display a background picture on a HD+ level display and pretty much do everything that is possible on a modern PC that your average user is doing. The darn thing was 32-bit, meaning that the apps could never allocate more than 2G (or 3G on a tuned machine) of address space and it was enough, even for video editing/etc.

Back when FF went 64-bit/multi process I groaned because having a fixed 2G limit, which seemed terrible at the time, created a nice upper bound on how much CPU+RAM it would consume so the developers assured it ran reasonably well with those kinds of system resources. Now the sky's the limit, and if you dare limit its resource utilization via cgroups/etc it won't work 1/2 the time.

And of course its your fault if you don't have a 16 core, 32G PC. To run a text editor and a chat application.

Ah, some good food for thought for those new Linux users that have no understanding of software engineering and caching.

Because most engineers know that memory usage of different pieces of software does not mean very much. It is very possible that that a DE boots into 100 MB, and then it's usage grows to absurd level while it is being used due to poor coding or architectural practices, while another DE might use 500 MB at boot, and then not increase very much because all its core logic is contained within this amount of memory.

Many enthusiastic people entering the Linux world, the type that run neofetch and post it on Reddit every time they jump to a new distro, are always really interested in the RAM usage figures, as if they were a real indicator of "bloat".

While I immensely appreciate how clearly it defines the methodology of this comparison, posts like this are a good way of keeping that dumb practice of running `free` after boot and drawing conclusions alive.

I have been using xfce for years now. I would recommend people try it, no matter what your machine specs (I have a good laptop).

It is just, really, really, fast. I mean, there is a bit of latency opening Firefox or TB from cold, but everything else is just... Instant.

Tabbing windows, instant response when clicking buttons. It is night and day when comparing to windows. I use it all day, rarely reboot, and it never lags. My phone lags way more than desktop even. It is a desktop that gets out of your way :)

The downside is it makes using MS windows very frustrating (I keep thinking I must have missed clicked due to delays), but I don't have to use windows much thankfully.

I'm actually less interested in how much RAM the desktop uses in normal usage, and more interested in how gracefully it handles curveballs. For instance, some time ago I accidentally pointed a file manager at a directory containing a massive JPEG image (I think it was a photo of decapped chip, or something of that nature). The file manager immediately decided to generate a thumbnail, ate all the physical RAM, and triggered a swapstorm that made it next to impossible to find and kill the offending process. It took best part of five minutes to regain control of the computer.

I still think that the desktops eat a huge amount of resources. Win98 ran correcly with 32mb and you had more or less the same features of nowadays desktops.

My Ubuntu KDE installation uses ~700MB RAM at idle with a fresh login and I've been using it with Wayland for years now without the problems the author describes.

My Steam Deck KDE uses ~1.3GB, more than half of which is taken by the baloo_file_extractor process.

Apparently doing background indexing of file contents gobbles RAM. Not sure if that's the problem with the author's setup?

Interesting, MATE should be under 400MB or less if you do not enable optional HUD or tray resident applications. Even in 64bit, it ran just fine on a pi2b with 512MB ram, and was about 340MB at boot-up with marco (no colord, HUD terminal, or evolution mail etc.).

The issue arises in how linux reuses ram pages for shared objects. While you may have many processes... the actual incremental program size can be very small. One of the many reasons oversized kernel ram cache/buffer sizes can help with performance (often as high as 40% on small flash memory io-constrained devices).

A heavily customized MATE on Ubuntu LTS OS is part of the standard developer platform I recommend. This takes a bit of effort, but there are benefits to having everyone on the exact same hardware, OS, and compiler version. i.e. cloning/repairing a workstation snapshot takes 30 minutes.

What on earth requires to eat 1.5 gig of RAM? I'm writing this under KDE 22.08 and plasmashell took 700m RES. KWin 180m RES. Why we were able to server the same windows in 90 with 64m RAM total, now window manager requires 180m. No composition is running. Functionality basically the same, no user experience breakthrough. And yet.

I would be fine with high memory usage if it was almost all shared memory, but what really annoys me is that it isn't. Also the lack of cross platform UI toolkits(not just Windows-Linux cross platform, but really such that they integrate with KDE, gnome, xfce, and anything else as well as Windows). Take just one example, system tray. There is no common interface for it. Same with many other things. Don't get me wrong, Linux in the desktop today is usable, but it leaves a lot be desired.

Just FYI a new release of XFCE is imminent starting this week. This is version 4.18, coming out two years after the last release.

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.18/roadmap

My take on the same subject on FreeBSD:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/07/12/desktop-environmen...

XFCE continues to be one of the best bangs for one's buck. I would like to see stats for it with the compositing disabled (it feels faster for me).

*on Fedora

Now do it again on a different distro which packages different default apps and services, and see how these values differ by multiple hundreds of MB.

KDE is so nice rn. Dolphin, Okular, KDE Connect, Krita, Kate, solid software and foundation.

I would like to see a similar comparison, but for the latency of completing various actions, like startup time, switching windows, opening the launcher menu, navigating to a subdirectory...

These are the things that matter to me - much moreso than RAM usage. My informal anecdotal experience is that XFCE latency is nearly always imperceptible, whereas GNOME latency is nearly always perceptible.

That's how to do a comparison :) Clear and straight-forward explanation, results, and no time-wasting video. Well done.

While memory usage is not a perfect metric of how "bloated" a piece of software is, I would't say it's useless either. That memory isn't just sitting there, it's being read, written, moved, meaning the software uses it to do things which also take up CPU and other resources. There is no escaping that doing more stuff in the background means less prioritization for your active usage so the software feels (and is) slow to respond.

Now if that background/automated stuff is useful to you then that's that, you can't have something for nothing. But if you don't care for most of it I don't see why you would keep it around and not benefit from a snappy system. If you've never tried using a window manager instead of Desktop Environment give it a try, it's extremely simple and you can have both in parallel. See if you miss anything from DEs, I for one don't.

I still use LXDE, the predecessor to LXQT, on my daily driver: a Thinkpad T420 (~12 years old) with 8GB RAM.

Low resource usage is the main reason I use LXDE. I often need to run several (4+) VMs, each of which can eat up to 2GB RAM. (These are headless VMs running specialist networking software). When running all of them I need to be really, really careful not to use up all my RAM because if I do, my system just freezes. Everything is stuck - cursor, clock, applications, etc. At this point my only choice is to reboot.

I don't know if this is due to a poorly-configured system (isn't swap supposed to prevent this?), but it certainly makes me much, more aware of memory usage.

It's also nice to be able to use the same base system (Debian + LXDE) on my modern T420 as well as a Pentium 3 laptop with 128MB RAM. I don't think I'd be able to say the same with KDE or Gnome!

I'm curious how Sway WM and i3 ranks here.

For comparison, earlier in the year: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/07/12/desktop-environmen...

            | htop(1) | conky(1) | freecolor(1)
    FreeBSD |  112 MB |    - -   |  157 MB 
    Openbox |  237 MB |  460 MB  |  382 MB 
       MATE |  508 MB |  778 MB  |  788 MB 
       XFCE |  533 MB |  794 MB  |  829 MB 
 helloSystm |  585 MB |          |  830 MB 
      GNOME |  625 MB |  990 MB  | 1000 MB 
     Plasma |  730 MB | 1659 MB  | 1167 MB

I was surprised that MATE was more lightweight than XFCE.

To the author. The wording you use in the text may get you banned from your source of income, as it’s against their terms to do that. Not mentioning any brand names, as I’m paranoid that might trigger some tag based thing somewhere and lead to the ban.

There are still ways to get donations to Russia. Look at what popular opposition Telegram channels do regarding this. Crypto-hate notwithstanding, this would be a legitimate use case.

Isn't the point of having RAM to fill it in order to cache objects? To me measuring how much RAM a DE uses is strange because I would expect it to consume enough RAM to be snappy but be able to adopt in a constrained system. If however I have 8G free, use it away, I don't see the point in having RAM I paid for sitting around unused.

I used to chase down xfce, lxde, openbox,etc to find the best light weight WM for me, problem nowadays is that, I need chrome on all of them, whose memory usage alone overshadows all those windows managers.

unless chrome can somehow run in, say, 200MB of RAM, the windows manager are no longer that important to me on the resource consumption side.

I'm running fluxbox, I recently switched from xfce (which I've been using for years and was my go-to). I have to say I'm very impressed, simple and easy to use, certainly MX Linux's set up is pretty flawless. Like a halfway house between traditional and tiled window manager.

The comparison is missing sway/Wayland and i3/X

These numbers only matter if the DE is of significant size compared to your applications.

So basically, if you plan to use a browser that is not links, don't waste your time with a minimal WM (unless you want to for personal reasons).

Worth remembering this is the usage of a default setup (+ some indexing it seems). It's quite easy to drop a lot from that usage if you don't need akonadi, baloo, and a few other things.

Love to see Cinnamon/MATE represented.

Now do AwesomeWM. Easily my favorite DE. Threads the needle between simplicity like i3 but has the power to do anything with it's full Lua config.

LXDE is missing... I quite like it, I started using it when I was looking for the lightest DE that I could find, but now that I see IceWM and how light it is, I have to try it!

(I started with XFCE which I loved). The only problem that I encounter is that my display is 1024x600 max resolution, so with some DEs the windows would be so big that they couldn't fit the monitor, even if I try to make them smaller...

If anyone has any suggestions for an even lighter one, please share.

Whatever happened to LXDE? Not sure if the whole team went with LXQT, but I really liked the old one. Still use lxterminal every day.

https://github.com/serprex/nobox would make for a good baseline, it uses about 12K resident memory

It was my desktop environment for years until I switched to wayland & sway. My desktop had 512MB ram until I got a new desktop in 2019

Fedora is most bloated distro in existence. It's bad distro to do this comparisons. Even Ubuntu has significantly lower RAM usage out-of-the-box.

Also GNOME can be stripped out of packages and services you don't need.

For example my Debian with GNOME Wayland boots into ~700MB. With Brave and terminal running, reading this thread, it's 1.07GB.

What’s the difference between MATE-Compiz in Fedora and the vanilla MATE you find in other distros, like Debian?

I found Gnome to offer the best mix of stable tiling and normal UX while supporting both wayland and x11 with good enough customization options through its extensions, so it's an easier to set-up solution for notebooks to which often connect a mouse.

> Post installation the system will be fully upgraded and rebooted

While most users will use OS like this, the results become not easily reproducible, as new updates sometimes improve or worsen performance. Why not take release image and test without updates?

What is the point of VM because everyone has different environment when everyone would get different performance on VM depending on the environment? Should just compare on the identical machine and that does just good job of comparison, duh