![]() If I had to rank them sluggish to snappiest, it'd be Gnome3, a biiiiiig gap, KDE, Cinnamon, MATE & XFCE in a tie for 2nd snappiest, and LXQt & Moshka tied for snappiest. Nowhere near as bad as Gnome3 but more sluggish than XFCE or MATE, even slightly more sluggish than Cinnamon. Similarly, despite KDE's very light memory usage, it doesn't feel light. Cinnamon, even though it's only a hair lighter on memory usage, is vastly snappier. One thing these stats fail to capture is how fast they "feel" on slow hardware. Note that in this case KDE is running with the compositor turned off, because Kwin doesn't like the 945GM driver. Fairly consistent with results above, everything is slightly faster and slightly lighter across the board. Kubuntu 20.04 w/ nouveau - 368MB - 1010MB - 1:17Įdit: Adding more results with a different laptop, this time a Dell D820 with no proprietary drivers (Intel 945GM graphics), 3GB of RAM, and a hair faster CPU. Xubuntu 20.04 w/ nouveau - 428MB - 950MB - 1:07 (I forgot to run a test with the nV driver under Xubuntu) (format: Distro - memory usage in HTOP boot - approx memory usage with Firefox open to Arstechnica home page (subject to some variation due to different ads) - time to boot from GRUB to desktop and launch HTOP)īodhi 5.1 w/ nVidia driver - 303MB - not tested - 1:10īodhi 5.1 w/ nouveau driver - 268MB - 760MB - 0:49 I was especially puzzled by Linux Lite's especially poor boot times, I'm wondering if that's some quirk of my installation. Surprise #2 is just how lightweight Mate is, and how not all that light weight XFCE is, considering XFCE's reputation. ESPECIALLY under KDE Plasma 5 (worth noting for the Kubuntu tests I had several Compiz features turned on, like wobbly windows and such). But for basic office use on older graphics chips, using the nouveau open source drivers shaves several seconds off boot times and in some cases hundreds of MB of memory usage. For users of relatively modern graphics cards who actually need maximum 3d performance for gaming or engineering software, the nVidia proprietary driver is the way to go. Surprise #1 is how much of a performance penalty is imposed by the nVidia proprietary drivers. If you've got a pet distro you'd like to see compared though I'm open to suggestions. I tested mostly Ubuntu derivatives because I wanted to evaluate the differences between various desktop environments and I wanted to minimize underlying infrastructure differences to control other variables. ![]() It is also a good test case because it throws Linux a couple curveballs a Broadcom b43 wifi chip that requires proprietary drivers and a discreet nVidia graphics chip. ![]() I am using this system because it represents the absolute minimum system I consider viable for modern basic web and office/school use:Ĭore 2 Duo T5750 (2.0GHz, 2MB cache, 667MHz FSB/memory)Ī fast(ish), 7200RPM mechanical hard disk. I've put a lot of time into this and I've gotten some interesting results, so I thought I'd share here so others can benefit from my testing.Įvaluation system: Dell Inspiron 1520. ![]() I've been doing some work lately evaluating various Linux desktop environments on low-end hardware. ![]()
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