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

[caligula]

Most modern computers use 8 gigs of ram. If you are running a PC XT with 640 megabytes you have a problem with a modern distro.
..
I wrote my first program in 1963, thousands more since.

Hmm. You do realize that Linux never ran on XT to begin with, right? When it comes to 640 megabytes, many single board computers have 256 to 1024 megabytes of RAM, shared with the GPU. They all run modern distros. I'm surrounded by computer running kernel 4.9 to 4.13 here with just 512 MB of RAM. Some of them even run plain old X.Org with a desktop environment (XFCE). I can watch videos with mpv, edit text with abiword, spreadsheets with gnumeric, statistics with R, I even run Java (gasp) based openhab. Seems to work just fine.

[caligula]

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.

Sadly you can't expect thorough analysis of the issue in modern times, that's the whole point of the comment section.

[boxie]

How much RAM is enough? There are plenty of laptops being sold which have just 2 gigs of RAM and no upgrade option. For their users every meg counts. TDE/KDE 3.5.10 consume less than 120MB of RAM. Your shiny modern KDE has this process cold Plasma which takes up to 300MB of RAM with zero plasmoids running. Why are people so full of shit?

Also go fuck yourself, dick. Unlike you I've been using Linux for almost 20 years now. What about you, a recent Windows 10 convert?

Also, using more RAM has never equated to being faster - actually the opposite is true. Old applications written in assembler/C run circles around their modern shiny JavaScript-everywhere counterparts which consume gigs of RAM.

You should drink a lot less Kool Aid, dude. More RAM usage means faster applications, my ass. Never read such a heresy in my entire life.

slow down there turbo!

1) If you are buying a new laptop in 2017 with 2GiB of RAM, then you are not doing anything that requires lots of RAM, otherwise you would buy a laptop with more RAM
2) "been using Linux for over 20 years now" - cool - have a cookie - me too - but I have used plenty of other operating systems as well in last 30+ years
3) please do not fall in love with things written in assembler - you trade development speed for a smaller binary. Modern development practices run rings around those of 40 years ago. That and GCC/LLVM are much better at assembler on any architecture than nearly every developer out there.
4) please, tell me again how the Linux slab cache does not speed up disk access in trade of using RAM? how does accessing things frequently off a slow disk drive make your system run faster than loading them into RAM and accessing them there?

There are a million and one trade offs in compute land. A lot of them can be solved by throwing a little bit more money at the problem, some of them can be solved by throwing a lot of money at developers.

please stop trotting out the "When I were a lad..." arguments - they stopped being true a really long time ago

[Zoll]

Am I the only one who doesn't really care about RAM usage? I have 32GB DDR4 and RAM is the least of my concerns.

[danielnez1]

Nah. It is just you who don't get how Ubuntu do it. That is okay. It's new stuff outside RH so it will take time to do away with narratives. Do you plan to stick around telling the same old story next time someone goes GNOME+session? I mean you didn't get it with classic session or ubuntu session, so why not aim for three strikes?

Sorry you lost me with your drivel. Please do continue, it's amusing.