Fedora 23: KDE vs. Xfce vs. GNOME vs. LXDE vs. MATE

[sarfarazahmad]

Well in my case, I been swamping xfce and mate, until I found the sweet spot, anyway not bad combination mate with xfwm4, maybe in a future I will try that.

You have got to try xfwm4. Its easy to customize. It might not be as easy on resources as say compton but it does bring a nice cohesive feel to the xfce4 desktop but It does bring a degree of finesse to the mate desktop.

[Barnabas]

Would you mind retesting with the "unredirect and disable compositing when there's a fullscreen application running" features enabled in Plasma 5? It takes two mouse clicks in a config window.

And on this topic I think it would be nice to see some articles on how to configure the various desktops for the best performance rather than just out of the box settings. I always like to "tune" my setups for the best performance, but being a Linux noob I don't really know where to start.

[norsetto]

Hmmm, interesting. It seems (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/LXQt) that lxqt is available in Fedora? If so, perhaps it would be worth to check it out too.

[bug77]

I think it is very fair to run the software as is. That's the defaults any user are going to get, than you test what the users are going to experience...
What you are asking is not fair to the other ones. It's like you would have a performance test and your application runs faster because of aggressive caching(Chrome for example), you are satisfied with the result and then somebody has a memory test and sees that your application consumes a lot more memory and you ask them to disable caching and then compare...
You decided to have that tradeoff, than it is absolutely fair to everybody else to run the defaults on everybody and not tune for each case separately...

You make a fair point. On Windows or OS X, that is. Because I'm having a hard time imagining anyone tech-savvy enough to use KDE, but at the same time oblivious enough to not disable redirecting in full screen.
Sure, it's baffling that checkbox isn't ticked by default and it's easier for Michael to test stuff out of the box, but seriously, when testing with different settings, it really limits the usefulness of the benchmark. Just imagine the same situation when testing various C++ compilers.

[droste]

The reason it's not enabled by default in kwin is that it can cause flickering when you switch between the desktop and your fullscreen app (alt+tab).
This is why I leave it disabled and just switch off compositing if I actually need the best performance (alt+shift+f12) and reenable it when I'm finished playing (alt+shift+f12).

[axfelix]

They should really just enable it by default, even so. It doesn't break vsync the way that unredirecting fullscreen does in compiz, and being able to *dynamically toggle compositing entirely* is a unique feature in Kwin that they won't get enough credit for this way.

Besides, I really just want to see the benchmark so I don't have to test it myself

[bvbfan]

First of all, FPS over 60 is great playable, 90 or 100 no matter. Only stupid kid can think other. Second of all everyone must use what they want and love, no matter Xfce, Gnome, Kde or so on.

[patrakov]

I'm having a hard time imagining anyone tech-savvy enough to use KDE, but at the same time oblivious enough to not disable redirecting in full screen.

When KDE suppored full-screen color correction, that was THE reason to leave full-screen windows redirected. On wide-gamut monitors, even games absolutely need color correction (so that eyes don't bleed because of otherwise oversaturated colors), and manufacturers are putting such displays even in laptops now.

It's a pity that full-screen color correction is no longer available in modern desktop environments. The line of thought is that it belongs to applications, but nobody is willing to magically fix old binary-only games, either.

[bug77]

First of all, FPS over 60 is great playable, 90 or 100 no matter. Only stupid kid can think other. Second of all everyone must use what they want and love, no matter Xfce, Gnome, Kde or so on.

That goes without saying, but these kind of benchmarks are more geared towards telling you how the DE overhead measures up against different DEs. Well, unless Michael just presses a button and generates some charts. Then there's not much to learn, besides the default behaviour.

[MoonMoon]

First of all, FPS over 60 is great playable, 90 or 100 no matter. Only stupid kid can think other.

Not quite true. At first, there are people out there with 120 or 144Hz monitors. Second, having 100 FPS does tell me that I can enable more visual advancements (better AA, better AF, ...) until I get down to 60 FPS again, so in the end it does matter.