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

First is a look at the overall boot time as reported via systemd.

Xfce was the fastest but less than a second after that was GNOME Shell and Openbox too. It does appear GNOME on Wayland (rather than X11) may be slightly quicker in firing up, which wouldn't come as much of a surprise. Unity 7 was right in the middle of the desktops while surprisingly LXDE was taking a while to fully load, but not as slow as the KDE Plasma 5 startup or Budgie in last place.

At the kernel stage, Plasma 5 seemed to cause a slowdown compared to the other desktops. When repeating the tests, same behavior.

here's a look at the userspace stage of the boot process from this Razer Blade Stealth laptop/ultrabook.