Ubuntu 13.10 Desktop Tests: Unity 7.1, KDE 4.11, Xfce 4.10, GNOME 3.8.4, LXDE

To end off August we have benchmarks up of five popular desktop environments running on Ubuntu 13.10 as of Friday. With feature freeze passing, we now have a good look at the desktop competition for Ubuntu 13.10 and how each of the desktops perform.

This desktop testing was again from the System76 Gazelle Professional notebook, which sports the Intel Core i7 4900MQ "Haswell" CPU with HD Graphics 4600. The desktops being benchmarked today with 2D and 3D/OpenGL workloads included Unity 7.1.0, KDE Plasma 4.11.0, Xfce 4.10, GNOME Shell 3.8.4, and LXDE 0.6.0. All of these desktop environments were fetched from the Ubuntu Saucy archives as of 30 August.

Aside from benchmarking all of the latest Ubuntu packages as of Friday, all desktops were left in their stock configurations aside from setting the KDE option of disabling desktop effects for full-screen windows. In addition, all desktops were running directly atop an X.Org Server without any use of Mir/XMir. All benchmarking was handled by the Phoronix Test Suite software where anyone can easily carry out and reproduce their own performance benchmarks and other automated tests atop an open-source platform.

The testing in this article is very similar to Linux desktop performance comparisons we have done in the past but with using Ubuntu 13.10 and the latest operating system packages, so let's jump straight to the results.