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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.

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.

1 comments

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