Power & Memory Usage Of GNOME, KDE, LXDE & Xfce

[vk512]

Unity 7 Vs. KDE 4.13 Vs. Gnome 3.12 Vs. Xfce 4.10 Vs. Lxde

I would also like an update on the potential battery life difference between the various DE.
Unity is definitely the most power-hungry of the lot and KDE 4 has matured very well now, but hungrier DEs may also be more power-efficient.

I guess everyone would have to try on his/her personal config what gives a better battery life by streaming one playlist from Youtube for instance. General benchmarks from Michael won't be of much use since consumption does depend a lot on the hardware (HDD/SSD, quantity of RAM, deactivating USB 3...). Phoronix is not really the place to tweak and test all these.

Plus it is now pretty common to find middle-range laptops with 5h+ of battery life so anything below a 10% difference won't really matter and is more about setting up a battery-saving mode than choosing a DE. It is really more about the quality of the battery over time - and how to optimize it (keeping it in the 30-80% as much as possible?).

[tmpdir]

I'm new around this place, and the report function is noted to be only used for harrassment, thus with my reputation the report post is very risky
But you are always welcome to report my post to get Michael's attention

*Grinn* I don't think my streetcreds are enough either.

[nonkreon]

I second that...

I did run these test on my laptop for lxde and xfce... both seem improved, but than again... the kernel also got a lot better (I'm testing on 3.12 rc4)

p.s. should we try the 'report post' function to get michaels attention? >:|

I'm new around this place, and the report function is noted to be only used for harrassment, thus with my reputation the report post is very risky
But you are always welcome to report my post to get Michael's attention

[tmpdir]

second that

There are great version shifts and changes between these results from 3 years ago and now, I really think you should consider doing this test again Mr. Larabel

I second that...

I did run these test on my laptop for lxde and xfce... both seem improved, but than again... the kernel also got a lot better (I'm testing on 3.12 rc4)

p.s. should we try the 'report post' function to get michaels attention? >:|

[nonkreon]

Retest, Retest, Retest

These tests need to be redone today: power and memory usage of gnome, kde, mate, xfce... and no ubuntu this time please!

There are great version shifts and changes between these results from 3 years ago and now, I really think you should consider doing this test again Mr. Larabel

[Adarion]

Signed.

[halo9en]

These tests need to be redone today: power and memory usage of gnome, kde, mate, xfce... and no ubuntu this time please!

[molecule-eye]

More real-world test

It would be nice to see this test redone from a more realistic usage perspective. E.g., it would be nice to see the computers set to do some light/moderate web browsing with some text editing/word processing, file navigation, etc. in between.

The tests done here are so far away form real world usage that one has to wonder how useful they are.

[molecule-eye]

Some subjective testing

I did a little *subjective* battery testing on my laptop (Core Solo 1.06Ghz ULV, Intel 945GM, 2GB RAM, SATA HDD), pitting KDE 4.4.5 Kubuntu 10.04 vs. latest (stable) gnome version in Ubuntu 10.04. I noticed essentially no difference between the two. Compositing enabled in both, doing basic things like reading/scrolling/opening documents (mostly pdfs), text editing, and web browsing mostly. I imagine the important thing is that I try to use programs intelligently, which means almost never scrolling (I use page downs instead) and disabling/quitting programs that cause a lot of wake ups according to powertop. Maybe if I ran my laptop on the battery as I would from a power source things would be different, but do (sensible) people do that?

I find this quite satisfying actually because I like KDE quite a bit more than gnome (especially because of Okular, Kile, Kopete, Dolphin, Gwenview and plasma-desktop vs their gnome counterparts), and while KDE feels sometimes a bit more sluggish than gnome (I think mainly for opening more feature-filled apps), it's not a problem if you already have them open when you move to battery power.

[curaga]

Realy? DDR3?

No, DDR2. I still see no need for DDR3, except that due to ddr2's price hike it will soon be cheaper...