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

[leipero]

I'm really suprized about LXDE (and Budgie to the extent), on my spare machine with very slow spinning drive (fast one died recently...) LXDE (Lubuntu to be precise) owns pretty much everything, it boots twice as fast as any other DE, I can't remmember how Budgie acted on that drive, if it was faster than GNOME or not, but for sure, LXDE was twice as fast compared to anything.

But to be honest, those numbers may differ from user to user after some time, depending on what is used in system. LightDM is usually faster than GDM for me, not a big difference on SSD, but still.

[ua=42]

Why not include the plasma5 Wayland session too?

Probably because it isn't complete like gnome's.

[bregma]

Too bad you couldn't include Unity 8 in that mix.

Just too damn bad.

[Guy1524]

Too bad you couldn't include Unity 8 in that mix.

Just too damn bad.

Agreed, I am still bitter about mark cuckleworth canceling unity 8 / mir.

[smartalgorithm]

want to use kde plasma? don't use ubuntu haha

[geearf]

Was Akonadi running when using KDE?

I was wondering about things like that too.
A default Ubuntu Plasma must have a lot of (unneeded) services running.

[M@GOid]

I did a test like this a while ago, using live Ubuntu spins on a flashdrive, opening the terminal emulator and checking the RAM, my results with KDE5 where much less than what Michael got.

And yes, if you get hid of Akonadi, KDE RAM consumption can only be beaten by LXDE/XFCE.

[Dreakon]

What the hell did they manage to do to Budgie in Ubuntu? Jesus.

I too am pretty shocked by these results. Granted, I've only used Budgie on Solus and Antergos, but it's always been very snappy and well optimized. Hopefully the Ubuntu Budgie guys can get this sorted because there is no reason it should be that slow.

[boxie]

KDE 5 is a freaking resource hog and the worst offender is Plasma. Ever since KDE4 was introduced KDE developers have stopped caring about speed, performance and optimizations. That's sad really because I used to love KDE, but now I'm using XFCE exclusively.

really? that sounds like you are spouting shit that you know nothing of

Been using KDE's plasma in anger now for more than a year on the neon distro, can't say I find anything you said here to be true.

RAM is there to be used, it makes things fast - why not use it?

[gbcox]

Great article... would be interesting to see how LxQT stacks up...
When I've tried GNOME it has been fairly responsive... too bad it's so hard to customize.