This might be a controversial topic and might bring the wallflowers out screaming with high opinions, but has anybody tried to run meaningful benchmarks with TDE?
I'm not talking about click-bait or hardware benchmarks. More like how snappy TDE actually is. Another benchmark is energy consumption.
Both types of benchmarks probably need several days of data collection to be meaningful. Data that is collected with more than 10 minutes in a virtual machine and an author bio photo wearing sunglasses.
I tinker with vintage computers. Earlier today I installed TDE 14.1.3 on some dual core clunkers with SATA II spinners. I do not expect spinners to impress anybody these days, let alone SATA II, but the desktop is way snappier than I was expecting. No hanging or stuttering. The most important benchmark is solitaire (KPatience) runs nicely.
With these observations, I realized could survive for a while with these computers if my main rig bit the dust. (I am going to test TDE on some single core systems too. :-))
I am not much surprised TDE runs well on these systems. After all, KDE 3.5.10 was released in the same time period these computers were sold. With these spinners Konqueror responds nicely, even with network shares. And that raises a different topic to enjoy favorite beverages -- why are most GUI file managers/explorers so slow compared to Konqueror?
Kudos to the devs, past and present.
Yesterday I was doing some oddball testing of the dual batteries on my T580 laptop. Although the laptop was idle much of the day, I noticed overall energy consumption was low. I never really looked at that before with other desktop environments, but the trivia got me thinking. Is TDE more energy efficient than other modern desktops? Is that even measurable?
So let the vampires and werewolves loose. I am not looking for mere confirmation bias slaps on the back. Let me know if you have some ideas how to test TDE in a meaningful manner.
Yes, all things considered, nobody really gives a hoot. Just use whatever tickles your fancy.
If you can't tell, I am going a bit stir crazy. Spring just refuses to come this year. :-(
On Monday 07 April 2025 16:16:57 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
This might be a controversial topic and might bring the wallflowers out screaming
I take umbrage at being stereotyped as a wallflower. I can be very sociable, sometimes, after about four pints of Guinness, and if the music is right, and the house band is really cooking.
<snip>
So let the vampires and werewolves loose.
Again, vampires and werewolves are some of my best friends.
For what it's worth, my SSD got fried by a neighbor who blew the electricity for everybody nearby. The laptop still works, just haven't replaced the SSD yet, and don't know if I will until I get into better circumstances. These SSDs are very temperamental, as well as expensive, and the power grid here is reminiscent of a third world country, where everybody has hot-wired their homes to the same circuit, and everything keeps blowing out from overloads.
However, I installed Devuan Daedalus with the Trinity desktop onto a flash drive, and run my system and do everything normally from that.
I don't mean that I am running the system from a live image; I mean, I formatted the hard drive as ext4, then installed the Linux system to that, partitioned with root, swap and home directories. It runs fine, except maybe a trifle slower than the SSD was, and sometimes I get hangs.
I may bring up the problem of hangs later, when I have more time to study on the problem, and to discuss it in depth.
In my own experience, this probably would not be viable if I were using another desktop like KDE Plasma, or Gnome, or another resource-hogging desktop. Trinity is so fast and efficent that it boggles the mind; and even running my system like this, it's still faster and I have more control, can accomplish more, than if I were using some other desktop.
Don't know if that's the sort of response you wanted, but I thought it worth sharing.
Bill
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.
On Wednesday 09 April 2025 11:00:23 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
On 4/9/25 12:06 AM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
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.
If memory serves, we had a much earlier thread about TDE's speed, and somebody posted links about comparisons among various DEs. TDE was the fastest among the more "robust" desktops (as is, full of features, etc.). Only the really barebones minimalist desktops were maybe a little faster.
Perhaps somebody else here remembers that thread, or can help us by finding some such link with comparisons of various DEs?
Bill
ср, 9 апр. 2025 г., 21:43 William Morder via tde-users < users@trinitydesktop.org>:
On Wednesday 09 April 2025 11:00:23 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
On 4/9/25 12:06 AM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
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.
If memory serves, we had a much earlier thread about TDE's speed, and somebody posted links about comparisons among various DEs. TDE was the fastest among the more "robust" desktops (as is, full of features, etc.). Only the really barebones minimalist desktops were maybe a little faster.
I have two ideas for benchmarking:
one is to use qemu with -accel tcg -icount shift=N where N=1 and up to 9 I think ;)
Really slows things down, so speed difference due to cpu activity magnified heavily.
Another one is to use external (not depended on system under test) video capture device and measure responce times between user clicking on UI elements and any responce by measuring time in frames between two events. More fps - more accuracy ?
Perhaps somebody else here remembers that thread, or can help us by finding some such link with comparisons of various DEs?
may be links in this thread?
https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinitydeskto...
googled it from tablet/firefox.
Sadly google search stopped worked woth konqueror's js implementation lately, so one bit of functionality was taken away .....
But turbo yes to using sw developed on/for slow computers on relatively overpowered ones. Even qemu-system-ppc (~10x slowdown in integer perf relative to host) can run macos 9 UI reasonably snappy on AMD FX 4300 host (and yes, I bought AMD FX based machine in 2022 because previous one worked reliably. Complete with VGA input monitor. Too many horror stories about link training failures during my stay on #nouveau ...)
Bill
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On Wednesday 09 April 2025 15:50:03 Andrew Randrianasulu via tde-users wrote:
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.
If memory serves, we had a much earlier thread about TDE's speed, and somebody posted links about comparisons among various DEs. TDE was the fastest among the more "robust" desktops
<snip>
Perhaps somebody else here remembers that thread, or can help us by finding some such link with comparisons of various DEs?
may be links in this thread?
https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinitydeskt op.org/thread/T4AFXJK2JWKYCQLYGCE2JACQVA3GH6N6/
Yes, thank you. That wasn't quite a direct hit, but near enough that it led me to something useful.
The heading of the thread, for anybody searching Kmail to find it: TDE vs LXDE, LXQT and XFCE
And that led to this reddit page: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/kb0cp6/i_compared_the_ram_... https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/kb0cp6/i_compared_the_ram_...
There you can see how Trinity compares favorably to the very light desktops.
Bill
On 4/10/25 2:56 PM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
And that led to this reddit page: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/kb0cp6/i_compared_the_ram_... https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/kb0cp6/i_compared_the_ram_...
There you can see how Trinity compares favorably to the very light desktops.
I too saw that reddit thread. :) The OP seems to have used some kind of averaging to obtain the final results. An improvement over wearing cool sunglasses, launching a VM, and reporting initial memory usage.
The results do not apply some kind of objective measure to snappiness and responsiveness outside of subjective perception, but a helpful start.
In the so-called lightweight territory, LXQt does not provide its own window manager, depending instead on other window managers. Overall there is a dearth of native LXQt tools like TDE provides. To be fair to the LXQt devs, they focus only on the desktop, presuming users will adopt other Qt5 apps for a full system. I think in the end LXQt requires pulling in a lot of KDE tools to become useful.
I know little about Lumina other than being ported from BSD. Interesting considering the general lack of desktop focus in the BSD world.
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Andrew Randrianasulu -
Darrell Anderson -
William Morder