E17 Does A Desktop Shootout, The Winner Is....

[Hamish Wilson]

Yeah, see your Fedora XFCE memory usage is only 200+ MB. The Ubuntu memory usage in the shootout is over 900MB.

Crazy.

Yeah, at the moment I have Chromium open with 15 tabs open, Desurium open in my tray, LibreOffice displaying an ODT on my second screen, and two instances of Thunar and I am only using 811 mb.

Might be a difference in how lxtask gets it's information though.

[crazycheese]

Once again LXDE is forgotten about, which annoys me considering its pretty much the only TRUE lightweight DE that is still actively maintained.

Sorry, but LXDE website is dead, its session manager is broken and many ways of performing basic tasks are counterintuitive.
XFCE uses just 40MiB more and does all that better, with all major still existing issues being around Thunar, but not the DE.

[crazycheese]

Yeah, at the moment I have Chromium open with 15 tabs open, Desurium open in my tray, LibreOffice displaying an ODT on my second screen, and two instances of Thunar and I am only using 811 mb.

Might be a difference in how lxtask gets it's information though.

Chromium has a lot of memory leaks. Consider using Firefox instead. 500MiB vs 120MiB.

Yeah, see your Fedora XFCE memory usage is only 200+ MB. The Ubuntu memory usage in the shootout is over 900MB.

Crazy.

On Xubuntu with XFCE 4.8 the system used 160MiB.. Price for new features in 4.10?...

[gens]

i vote for xfce, although i dont use it

too all the nitpicks: the man clearly stated that its a subjective benchmark

on the other hand, the end user is almost always subjective
even more then some1 who can read the current memory usage


PS i remember Debian with xfce using 60mb, but lately my rig (openbox/fluxbox) is over 75mb at start
still its a lot better then default Ubuntu

[Hamish Wilson]

Sorry, but LXDE website is dead, its session manager is broken and many ways of performing basic tasks are counterintuitive.
XFCE uses just 40MiB more and does all that better, with all major still existing issues being around Thunar, but not the DE.

The LXDE website is not dead (I suggest you check it again); the last new blog post was on September 24th.

The session manager is not broken from my experience, and everything else is just personal opinion. PCManFM is definitely much better than Thunar at the moment.

I like Xfce and use it as my primary, but I also like LXDE and see that it can be better in several other use cases.

Chromium has a lot of memory leaks. Consider using Firefox instead. 500MiB vs 120MiB.

I was just commenting about how I was using bugger all memory, but anyway...

And considering the accuracy of some of your posts here, I do not think I am going to worry about it.

[JanC]

1. a first run is hardly a relevant metric

Depends on whether some self-adjusting preloading mechanism is used or not.

OTOH, running multiple tests and throwing away the outliers is always a good practice...

[energyman]

twm should be installed on every system. It is a nice, clean, simple fallback in case anything goes so wrong you can't start your normal environment. It is simple, runs if X runs and you won't feel cozy. Perfect.

[bwat47]

This is a stupid comparison, his boot times seem way off for gnome, kde, and unity. And I think his memory comparisons are also including cached memory, which is a pointless comparison.

[bwat47]

Sorry, but LXDE website is dead, its session manager is broken and many ways of performing basic tasks are counterintuitive.
XFCE uses just 40MiB more and does all that better, with all major still existing issues being around Thunar, but not the DE.

Multiple components of xfce just don't seem to be maintained at all (such as the volume mixer), so I don't really think xfce is necessarily in much better "condition" than lxde. And afiak, lxde's website has always had issues, I believe its still an active project. I've also never had any issues with lxdm. I've never really used lxde, but when I used XFCE on arch I used lxdm as my display manager and it seemed nice.

[allquixotic]

Wow. Ubuntu really sucks that much? After login into KDE, memory usage on my system is 290MB. What on earth is Ubuntu wasting the additional 1GB memory on?

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