Hi to everyone! 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-environ...
Thanks for the attention and have a nice evening/day. Kind regards. Gian
On 2024-10-20 04:24 PM, anguriamelone--- via tde-users wrote:
Hi to everyone! A simple question: how much is lightweight TDE in comparison with LXDE, LXQT and XFCE? Is it, perhaps, a middleweight?
It depends on your definition of "lightweight" and the distro you're using. Some distros have extra packages installed and running as daemons in the background which use memory. I consider Xfce to be middleweight and TDE, LXDE, and LXQT to be lightweight. If you want to know exact the exact difference of memory usage then try running each of them in a VM. Someone on Reddit did a comparison 4 years go so that might be a starting point: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/kb0cp6/i_compared_the_ram_....
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-environ...
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.
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.
anguriamelone--- via tde-users wrote:
Hi to everyone! 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/
Thanks for the attention and have a nice evening/day. Kind regards. Gian
I would say it's extremely lightweight. Do keep in mind that the original KDE 3 came out in 2002. TDE doesn't really feature any earth-shattering changes compared to how KDE was before Plasma released.
In my experience, a fresh Trinity session is less than 500 MB, and that's after opening Steam, Psi+, protonmail-bridge and gerbera since those are in my .xinitrc file. Your mileage will vary. On my main system I have only run TDE with the base packages.
I like to look at it this way: TDE is based off of one of the flagship DEs with a lot of features you would expect to find, compared to many of the options which are built from the ground up to be lightweight. If you are judging this based off of a performance-to-quality ratio like I would, TDE stands on top. The only serious drawback are the bugs on some more special setups, since this is ancient software. If there is extra performance gained by XFCE I personally can't see the benefit unless the desktop experience is on par or better, at a certain point the performance reaches a plateu where it becomes redundant.
Choose whatever works best in your experience, but I would go with TDE. You can also install the others all at once and try them out from the session manager if you would like to see what your personal preference leans towards.
Some weeks ago I installed TDE on a secondary, absolute potato PC (very old dual core pentium D-something) because I was curious and it blew XFCE totally out of the water in terms of responsiveness on that machine. Now its my main desktop across all platforms I use.
On Sun, 20 Oct 2024 22:24:19 +0200 (CEST) anguriamelone--- via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote:
Hi to everyone! 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-environ...
For what it's worth, my experience running TDE on a potato (laptop built in 2008, 2GB RAM, Athlon64x2 CPU) is that it's light and responsive. Total RAM usage on that system immediately after entering X was <300MB the last time I checked. It's running Gentoo without a display manager, which may reduce the amount of required RAM a bit.
E. Liddell
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