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I did _not_ just run `free` after boot, maybe you need to reread the methodology.

As for RAM leaking - I cannot and I will not account for that: such a test could take weeks to carry out. In my experience modern Linux DEs do not leak that much - people normally do not interact with their DE (yeah, I'm not joking) anyways - you boot into something, e.g. Gnome and you run your applications (e.g. web browser, spreadsheet, terminal emulator, media player, instant messenger, etc. etc. etc.) and your DE is running happily in background.

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You interact with your DE whenever you create a window, switch to another, press the Super button, right click on the desktop, get a popup notification, hit your media keys, and in a decreasing way the more you move towards the Window Manager end of the spectrum.

So of course I would expect fluxbox to use less memory than KDE, because fluxbox doesn't do anything if I press the volume keys (please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't used it in a decade)

Does that mean that fluxbox and all of its associated tools are going to be as snappy during real usage? You can't certainly know by just analysing the RSS and shared memory size of the fluxbox process.

> You interact with your DE whenever you create a window, switch to another, press the Super button, right click on the desktop, get a popup notification, hit your media keys, and in a decreasing way the more you move towards the Window Manager end of the spectrum.

Most of this is handled by a window manager. Again, most users launch their favourite set of applications at the start of the day and run them until (if) they log off. And the average programmer is no different: a web browser, IDE, terminal emulator, Telegram and Slack all running non-stop.

It's not so clear cut. Your kwin process uses the KDE libraries and facilities, some of which are used by Dolphin as well. It's a mesh of interconnected and communicating processes via IPC, unix sockets or shared libraries, not standalone islands. Firefox might show a native printing dialog that's exposed in some core code loaded when you logged in.

In fact the line between DE and WM on a bigger desktop gets blurrier, especially in the Wayland era when your WM is actually also your compositor, so handles all your windows and their positioning, input dispatch, permissions, etc.

If we go down this route no comparison will ever be "valid".

That's why this is strictly for Fedora 37 as of December 11th, 2022. :-)

If you have your own distro resuts to share, I will happily add them to the article.

That is my point. Yours is a well done comparison, but ultimately useless if not for pure curiosity.

I run Fedora Silverblue on a 64 GB machine, so RAM concerns are not very big for me. In any case, just for curiosity's sake:

    ~ % uptime
     10:38:17 up 2 days, 22:57,  1 user,  load average: 0.32, 0.45, 0.60
    ~ % free -m
                   total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
    Mem:           64083       12381        6576         729       45125       50252
    Swap:           8191          24        8167

Fluxbox is just about the snappiest window manager there is. On Arch, I actually used its precursor, blackbox.

It has better DPI scaling than most window managers today, and had zero functionality for notifications, volume keys, Super buttons, right clicking on the desktop, etc. it didn't even have alt+tab. Didn't even include a compositor for transparent windows.

I got to add all those myself and was happy with it for a while. Dunst (the notification daemon I used) allows you to change the content of a notification while it is showing, so I used that for displaying the current volume when I used the volume keys.

But after trying Fedora Silverblue I'm basically in love with GNOME Wayland now.

What things do you like the most about GNOME Wayland? Are those things specific to Silverblue? (I've been curious about Silverblue too for a while but haven't tried it yet.)

For one, the DPI scaling is perfect. Everything is crisp, clean vectors. There are no text scaling issues, no hinting issues, no antialiasing issues. It is simply a pleasure to use GNOME on a 4K display.

For two, the trackpad gesture support is perfect. Everything feels super natural and connected to your movement, and the spring animations are super nice. My only gripe is that there's no elastic overscroll in GTK apps, but eh. Firefox has it, and that's the majority of my computer time.

For three, somehow everything manages to have a mostly consistent theme despite GNOME not supporting server-side decorations. I was not expecting this.

I rebased to Kinoite to try KDE Plasma and couldn't get past the terrible scaling issues, the extremely outdated design, and the total lack of consistency. And forget about trackpad gestures. In fact, they don't even let you change your trackpad's cursor speed! Hope you like the default!

Most of what I like about GNOME is not Silverblue-specific. Although, being able to install Nvidia drivers with two commands and have them work flawlessly is almost certainly Silverblue-specific.