On 10/20/24 5:22 PM, Felix Miata via tde-users wrote:
anguriamelone composed on 2024-10-20 22:24 (UTC+0200):A simple question: how much is lightweight TDE in comparison with LXDE, LXQT and XFCE? Is it, perhaps, a middleweight? If it can be of interest, here is a discussion about ''lightness''.https://blog.lxde.org/2016/10/04/benchm … t-vs-xfce/https://blog.lxde.org/2016/10/04/benchmark-memory-usage-lxqt-desktop- environment-vs-xfce/Be careful when making or viewing comparisons to pay attention to available RAM. In general, the more that is available, the more a DE will use. IME, a default XFCE installation will use more than Plasma when enough of Plasma's copious automatically enabled background excesses are disabled.
That is a good point Felix. Desktops that scale memory use to the memory available may surprise you with how greedy they are.
anguriamelon, the only way to know is to test and this is a non-trivial task to get an exact number due to the many processes that are started and run by each desktop, sound, IPC, etc...
A reasonable, but non-exact gauge of RAM usage would be to boot cold, start the desktop and then compare memory use with "free -tm" or similar. You could use the varying "top" apps as well. You would need to use whatever apps within the desktop you normally use and get the memory usage after opening each, etc..
(don't forget to add the "buffers" back to the free memory when checking with "free -tm" as buffers represents memory used and freed and available for re-use)
TDE and the LX... desktops should be very light. KDE3/TDE based on Qt3 was developed when less than 512M of RAM was standard. Depending on what toolkit XFCE is built against, its affinity for memory may vary quite a bit.
Also note your benchmark link shows XFCE built against Gtk+2, which has been replaced with Gtk+3 (and now Gtk4). The benchmark uses the cold boot rough memory use for measurement. It is also silent on its consideration of memory used and released and available for re-use.
How "light" or "heavy" a desktop is on RAM use depends much more on how modular the software design is for the desktop. Pure memory use isn't a complete comparison. Plasma is incredibly "light" on the memory it uses due to how the desktop is broken up into separate processes with only a few active at a time. However, it is extremely computationally expensive compared to TDE in many regards.
So while it may not use as much memory (or slightly more), it is much heavier from a resources standpoint. Some of its components, especially sddm - can race along like a herd-of-turtles while you wait for nearly a minute as it crunches away on startup and displays its animation. kdm/tdm on the other hand is more capable and much lighter from a resources standpoint.
You may want other benchmarks in addition to just amount of RAM used if you want a good comparison on how a desktop will behave where is is limited RAM and limited processor capability.
-- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
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