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

[starshipeleven]

Me neither! We are dealing with so much trolling and fanboism. It is very difficult to get right.

fixed.

Why not skip kde and just do a heavily modified GNOME session like Ubuntu?

Because extensions breakage is still a thing in GNOME land.

[starshipeleven]

Watch your language. You missed the important part. If you can get 80% kde with 20% effort. Then it should be considered.

Adding to GNOME all the customizability of KDE in a way that isn't broken on any GNOME minor version is not "20% effort", I'll tell you that.

[starshipeleven]

Well if: "GNOME just happened to be developed by smart people that know how to make the best of systemd's features.", I expect it to be a no match for a window manager then as results of this benchmarks points out.

Sorry but that's nonsense.

A window manager is just a window manager. A full DE has a window manager AND a bunch of other services and stuff running in the background or pre-loading on startup.

So a window manager will always blatantly smoke a full DE on startup times and RAM usage. By definition.

[gbcox]

Ubuntu just proved how much you can customize with session support.

Yeah, IMO it's a shame that GNOME made those design choices - simplification over usability. Which, if you think about could explain the Phoronix test results. If you don't do much, you don't use many resources.

[ResponseWriter]

I know that it was an exaggeration, I was just pointing out that packaging issues are packaging issues, they not usually due to the software being "hard to package" per-se.

There are packaging issues even when the packagers are told how to deal with the upgrade. See https://plus.google.com/+MartinGräßl...ts/AwRyS1Nw6GZ

[starshipeleven]

There are packaging issues even when the packagers are told how to deal with the upgrade. See https://plus.google.com/+MartinGräßl...ts/AwRyS1Nw6GZ

More like "packagers didn't read the message".

[srakitnican]

Sorry but that's nonsense.

A window manager is just a window manager. A full DE has a window manager AND a bunch of other services and stuff running in the background or pre-loading on startup.

So a window manager will always blatantly smoke a full DE on startup times and RAM usage. By definition.

So you dare to doubt the results of the benchmarks?

[mgraesslin]

As a few readers here are surprised by the bad RAM usage values in Plasma I want to share some experience with Ubuntu: uninstalling the other DE is not enough. On Ubuntu you cannot properly uninstall a desktop environment and especially Unity is not able to deactivate its own services when another DE is started. So it's totally normal that you see Ubuntu's desktop below Plasma or that Ubuntu's power management service is still running.

Given that, I personally - from my experience with many, many bug reports covering this problem - would take this tests with a grain of salt.

[starshipeleven]

Oh, you clearly don't know how a session works. Let me help you. Sessions define settings overrides and local extensions to be loaded. This way you can create a fully customised and QAed desktop without depending on external code.

Oh, you clearly don't know how KDE works. Let me help you. KDE has extensive settings panels for the user to operate. This way the user can create a fully customised desktop without depending on external code that breaks left and right on any upstream code change, like extensions.

Adding that to GNOME so it can properly replace KDE isn't going to be easy.

That is how Ubuntu came up with a 80% Unity replacement for a 20% effort(a few months). kde could do it as well, and trim millions of LOCs.

Unity shared the same GNOME mindset, a relatively monolithic UI with limited customizability. KDE and most other DEs are different.

[starshipeleven]

So you dare to doubt the results of the benchmarks?

Yes, I already did when noticing that on my PC a Plasma 5 isn't using anywhere near 1GB of RAM, and startup times are like 25 seconds from a btrfs raid1 on mechanical drives.