Power Use, RAM + Boot Times With Unity, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE, Budgie & KDE Plasma

Lastly are some reference numbers from the desktops while idling after a fresh boot on this Razer Blade Stealth laptop using a Core i7 Kabylake processor with HD Graphics 620 and NVMe SSD storage and a 2560 x 1440 panel.

For the most part the numbers are close to each other with Xfce and Openbox being a little bit lower than the others. KDE Plasma did have a higher peak power use than the other desktops, but overall there weren't any big swings with the desktops yielding less than a one Watt difference generally speaking.

Hopefully you found these numbers interesting and be sure to see the earlier Linux laptop test results for more numbers from different distributions, laptops, etc. If there is sufficient interest in this article I can work on some additional tests from other devices and potentially other distributions as well.