On 4/9/25 12:06 AM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
Don't know if that's the sort of response you wanted, but I thought it worth sharing.
Not what I was seeking, but a good story. Thanks.
I am looking more of ways to measure some nominal benchmarks. I realize that running a DE and launching non native DE tools such a web browser skewers memory usage, energy usage, etc. Yet if the data is collected over many days, those kinds of data skews evens out. The differences should leave something distinguishable to each DE.
Collecting data for energy and memory usage might be straightforward. Collecting data for how responsive a DE might be seem probably is subjective but would be nice to measure something.
I have been using TDE almost exclusively the past few weeks. Recently I launched KDE 5 Plasma because I wanted to fully update TDE from 14.1.2 to 14.1.3. I used KDE 5 for about two years before recently returning to TDE. I worked hard at creating a minimal KDE desktop, stripping lots of cruft and removing many unnecessary packages. During that period I thought KDE was pleasantly acceptable and more important (to me), KDE is not based on GTK3 tomfoolery.
Returning to KDE had me pause. For a couple of years I thought KDE was acceptable yet I was required to notice the difference in speed and responsiveness. I don't want to knock KDE. KDE is pretty doggone good all things considered. Yet I am sure KDE defenders will argue that I am comparing apples and oranges and KDE is "far more capable" than TDE. Well, I'll accept that debate over some favorite beverages. TDE is just lightning fast. KDE is not. I still don't fathom how Konqueror can traverse large directories immediately and no other file manager seems able to match. I have a 4-core system and 16 GB or RAM. Same with my primary laptop. After using TDE for a few weeks KDE now seems slow. Not painfully slow, just notably slower.
I was thinking this morning that as fast as TDE seems compared to other DEs, that the fastest system I have seen is Windows for Workgroups (WFWG) 3.11 on my 450 MHz K6-III+ CPU with 256 MB of RAM. WFWG is 16-bit and designed for 486 CPUs with 16 MB of RAM or less. I well remember the first time I migrated WFWG from my 486 to my 586. I was dumbfounded by the huge increase in speed. I never have seen anything as fast since although TDE comes close.