Thanks. For those who are interested you can download the source images at the bottom of the article. People have been questioning applications/services/daemons running in background for each DE - you can check that.
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One thing that was missing for me was how you checked RAM usage, since a similar previous comparison that was posted on HN actually measured something different than what most people expected.
Since you helpfully posted the source images I checked to see what you did :)
I saw that you used the output of "free", which I think is not what most people think of as RAM usage (IIUC it reports the total virtual memory in use). I usually look at the output of `smem -atk` and look at total PSS. See https://lwn.net/Articles/230975/ for a clearer explanation on that.
I completely flushed system buffers prior to getting the results (echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches), so the free RAM that I posted is indeed absolutely free yet it cannot be reused.