Re: [LAU] Resource gains - lightweight Desktop vs KDE, Gnome

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014, Russell Hanaghan wrote: Atom single core, 1.6Ghz, 1G ram, 32bit... Not much difference from xfce to lxde/blackbox, that I can tell. Nice thing about xfce stock menu is that new SW just shows up in the menu... not much of a difference. Unity and gnome session just don't work well enough to run a browser let alone audio apps. This may be more video drivers related. KDE is tunable. But I have found the performance hit with no tuning to be not noticable really. I can run guitarix at 64/2 (USB AI) 64/3 (internal HDA) reasonably well. The major problem is memory, 1G is really not enough, 2G makes a difference. I have not added memory though because I don't use this for audio. I am running xfce and using Jack as the audio backend with pulse for desktop stuff, bvecause I do try some audio bits once in a while. So there is a small step from KDE OOTB over xfce, but unity and gnome session do take a lot more of something that my machine doesn't have. There are a number of people using a P4 single core to run more than I do on this. Like I say the biggest hit is memory. The WM generally is not the whole story, xfce WM is not much bigger than xfwm for example, but xfce generally has a whole pile of extra processes running.

Where this is noticable is that i use more than one "workspace". So the systray WS switcher is pretty imortant.