Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Graphics: Unity, Xfce, KDE, LXDE, GNOME, MATE, Openbox

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 17 April 2016 at 08:16 AM EDT. Page 2 of 2. 23 Comments.
Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Desktops

First up, the OpenArena classic:

Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Desktops

OpenArena ended up running the slowest on MATE 1.12 while a step ahead was KDE Plasma 5.5. The fastest was Unity 7.4 (the default on 16.04 LTS) followed by Openbox 3.6.

Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Desktops
Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Desktops

Tesseract was the fastest on Unity while the slowest on KDE Plasma.

Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Desktops

With Team Fortress 2, GNOME ended up being the slowest desktop because there was odd behavior with GNOME thinking the game had stalled and asking if it wanted to be force quit even though the game was still clearly running fine and thus plagued by these frequent, incorrect interruptions.

Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Desktops

There wasn't much difference in performance for the Xonotic first person shooter.

Well, those are the quick numbers from an Intel Skylake system I was playing with this weekend. More tests -- including from other GPUs/drivers -- are still baking. Again, it's the out-of-the-box experience on each of the desktop environments without any tweaking. There's also some desktop environment developers that recommend running Linux games in their own X.Org Server, etc.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.