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

[pracedru]

Yup it definitely depends on how the DE is preconfigured. I'm using KDE Neon which is a pretty spartan distro, and at start up it uses ~400mb of RAM with desktop effects and ~380 without.

Me too. I havent tried kubuntu 17.04, but maybe there is some config issues in that release.

[useless]

Something is very wrong with this benchmark. Just fired up a Virtualbox VM with a fresh Ubuntu 17.04 installation, ran

sudo apt-get install plasma-desktop

and there it is: 420MiB of RAM. Boot time: 12 sec. So, yeah, this seems a bit skewed.

I've a Fedora 26 KDE installation and 1GiB of RAM usage, but a lot of things startup automatically: four IMAP accounts, three google calendars agents, a couple of plasmoids, MEGA sync, NextCloud sync, Telegram client, and some other things I can't remember (akonadi and the Kontact suite takes a lot of RAM with its agents and SQL database).

Meanwhile, an openSUSE tumbleweed one with KDE consumes 440MiB of RAM (no mail accounts, a couple of plasmoids). Both systems only take less than 15 sec to boot with a Samsung EVO SSD.

[useless]

[starshipeleven]

Results of the test summarized: People packaging KDE and Budgie in Ubuntu are morons.

Really, no, just no. On OpenSUSE I get 500 MB of total ram usage with KDE, how in the bloody hell can they inflate it like that?

EDIT: uhm, so the guy above this post shows that ubuntu kde is still in line with what I saw, so the test was done wrong here.

[bug77]

Results of the test summarized: People packaging KDE and Budgie in Ubuntu are morons.

Really, no, just no. On OpenSUSE I get 500 MB of total ram usage with KDE, how in the bloody hell can they inflate it like that?

EDIT: uhm, so the guy above this post shows that ubuntu kde is still in line with what I saw, so the test was done wrong here.

As I've noted above, I had a very, very different experience between Kubuntu and installing KDE on top of Ubuntu.
Of course, being so easily messed up during packaging isn't exactly a testament to KDE's resilience either.

Edit: Looking at my install right now (Kubuntu 17.04 with backports, no tuning):

Startup finished in 2.660s (kernel) + 6.476s (userspace) = 9.137s

and that's on an i7-3630QM - i.e. not a particularly powerful CPU.

[alqm]

I'm can't be sure, but it seems GNOME makes a more aggressive use of RAM to speed things up, while KDE Plasma doesn't pull things to RAM unless it's immediately necessary - therefore pulling more stuff from disk.

Running GNOME Wayland - Fedora.

[useless]

As I've noted above, I had a very, very different experience between Kubuntu and installing KDE on top of Ubuntu.
Of course, being so easily messed up during packaging isn't exactly a testament to KDE's resilience either.

KDE resilience? If you do the packaging wrong, how is that a resilience issue? Kwin main developer blogged about it a couple of weeks from now: distros sometimes sucks at software packaging (read it, please). Don't blindly blame upstream code.

[bug77]

KDE resilience? What? If you do the packaging wrong, how is that a resilience issue? Kwin main developer blogged about it a couple of weeks from now: distros sometimes sucks at software packaging (read it, please). Don't blindly blame upstream code.

Well, if it wasn't something KDE specific, incompetent packagers would screw up all DEs, wouldn't they?
I still like KDE better, but that doesn't mean I think it's perfect

[ResponseWriter]

KDE resilience? What? If you do the packaging wrong, how is that a resilience issue? Kwin main developer blogged about it a couple of weeks from now: distros sometimes sucks at software packaging (read it, please). Don't blindly blame upstream code.

This one, and the link in the first sentence? https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/bl...s-the-quality/

Boot time for me is delayed with halting to type the LUKS key but it's still under a minute on my not particularly modern hardware (it's the generation before AMD's Bulldozer) but RAM usage on boot is still under 1GB, even with a couple of additional things that start on boot. I believe I read somewhere that KDE will use a little more RAM if available, although not sure how true or applicable that is.

[useless]

Well, if it wasn't something KDE specific, incompetent packagers would screw up all DEs, wouldn't they?
I still like KDE better, but that doesn't mean I think it's perfect

The thing is that KDE relies on Qt, which has its own release cycle, LTS support, and so on. But you're right: it ain't perfect.