KDE and XFCE are my favorites. I could probably daily drive XFCE but with higher resolution (4K) monitors, KDE tends to look a lot better, at least in my experience. I loathe Gnome and don't really understand why it has become the default DE on so many platforms.
Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics. A unified clipboard (kb shortcuts as well as shared buffer), proper 4k rendering/scaling at a nuclear level, etc. This is my biggest gripe with Linux.
I would ditch macOS entirely if I could do the following: 1. complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere (there are hacks for this, but they are hacks), 2. proper 4k rendering (no blurry stuff) with consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications, 3. the ability to copy and paste text into or out of a terminal without fuss.
I don't care about X11 vs Wayland.
All this considered - and I can't believe I am about to say this - Windows 11 is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be and I kinda like it. Might need to go see a doctor I am starting to say funny things.
It sounds like you might care though, albeit not directly. That blurriness is often the result of attempting to use fractional scaling (i.e. not an integer multiple like 200%, 300%, etc). This is common on 4k displays as many are too small for 100% scaling to be readable but too big for 200%. You can do fractional scaling on X11 but Wayland typically does it better, and without the blurriness.
Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays?
I'm flabbergasted that this is a question that should even be asked. Linux Desktop is so advanced and at the same time so lacking in stupidly simple matters such as this one, but here we are, look at how complex the answer marked as solution looks here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/285689/increase-mouse-wheel-...
(hint: the reasonable expectation, IMHO, would be to "open System Settings, go to Mouse Settings, and change a slider")
I've been in love with Linux Mint's Cinnamon and the very good balance between functionality and out-of-the-box experience. But no, the system settings don't allow to change the scroll speed. I won't complain, but it does confuse me...
Battery life and a more pleasant trackpad experience.
I know it's hard to tune a good trackpad profile with such varying hardware, but it sure.would be nice to get a MacBook like smoothness on a Linux DE.
And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend.
I'm okay with fedora on my laptop, and I must say I've gotten used to Gnome. There is a tweak tool for gnome that allows for adjusting some things I think should be tweakable and discoverable by default.
Look, I'm not an evangelist, but it solves so many annoying little problems with X11 that I never want to go back. You don't realize how much of a hacked-together, obsolete kludge that X11 is until you use an alternative.
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere
I also use a customized layout (mostly international English with shortcuts for German Umlauts and Y and Z remapped to eachother). It definitely works in most modern Linux desktops to use a "custom keyboard layout" like described here. There are many guides which are outdated on the topic. It's a hack and also not super simple to execute (you only need to do it once) but it is persistent and system-wide in all programs at least:
I'm using GNOME 43 right now on Wayland, and it is quite comfy. But this is mainly due to me heavily using extensions and tweaks to better the experience.
I agree that vanilla GNOME just isn't good enough. But especially for Wayland, GNOME is far superior to KDE in terms of stability and glitch-freeness.
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere
I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get your preferred keybindings:
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere
I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get what you want, too:
If you want completely monolithic & uniform experience built for your specific needs that no one else has on Linux but you, I don't think you'll be happy, ever.
> consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications
You can get fairly close to this if you use gnome or kde specific distros.
But you're generally asking: please don't be open source. Please don't have a bazaar of ideas. Please build me one big cathedral. You ask here is antithetical to the purpose of whom you are asking. On most general purpose distributions, users probably ought to end up having multiple different UI elements.
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere
I actually like this idea a lot, because it suggests a certain system-wide malleability layer that, at the moment, doesn't exist. Anywhere, on any system, at all. How would you go about making your Mac have consistent Windows keybindings, for example? I'd be interested to see how people thought we might tackle this, generally.
Folks could make a custom Linux distro that pre-configures each app to be Mac like. I think that's the best chance. But jeeze it seems like an unholy crusade to support a very specific niche, a niche not known for participating & giving back & relishing what we are & do. Awfully big bridge to build & it will forever have some rickety-ness to it.
You could use something like https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools to read certain Mac key-combos or what not and rewrite them. But what would you rewrite to? I don't have a good sheet of what it is you'd be asking for or wanting to just work.
My spitball idea for how we'd really fix this: I'd like each app to register with a dbus service all of the "actions"/commands it can do, and allow rebinding & activation of the actions over dbus. Maybe even actions actually are just dbus methods, but annotated somehow, to describe their hotkeys or to give them human friendly names? Anyhow, whatever the impl, there could be a central "hotkey manager" that could see all keyboard bindings & let us top-down manage them. There'd need to be some way for "Save" in Kate to be combined/grouped together with "Save" in Firefox, somehow, for this to be helpful. Managing this namespace of actions would be a terror of a problem, utterly absurd, in my view, which implies strongly the difficulty of the ask here I'm trying to respond to, but I actually think it'd be a pretty noble & cool effort. In part because of what it relates to:
System command apps. Tools like dmenu/alfred/albert/quicksilver are meant as general top down interfaces, are often scriptable/extensible/deeply configurable to allow fast access & control of a variety of actions. By recognizing keybindings as what they are: actions/commands, and suggesting that the "actions"/commands of an app get bubbled up to the system layer & get managed there, we just make these top-commanders more powerful. There's also an extreme parallel here to voice-agent systems, like Chrome Assistant, Alexa, Siri, where apps present actions & the system is in charge of taking user input and translating it into actuation; they too are directory systems of actions, rather than having each app in isolation.
> ability to copy and paste into or out of a terminal without fuss
Copy/paste just works for me? Not sure what the problem statement is here, and/or what terminals you've suffered under.
> Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics.
100%. My main personal laptop is 4GB. I run sway which is low resource consumption, but in general resource consumption seems like a huge non-factor to me. In general, Linux isn't going to win by being more conservative. Pining about resource consumption is self-rewarding, self-gratifying: one feels zealous & virtuous, like you have the true cause amid a fallen world & are the path of the defender. But IMO it's mostly detracting & abusing the good & necessary & vital suffusion of creativity & possibility into the world. The scope of consumption is not that bad. And we have the important task of figuring out where to go still ahead of us: I'd rather be conservative once we have better ideas of what works, at any resource budget, & hone back down from there. Rather than forever dance around this maxima/minima we're on & tune for what we have.
I'm also unimpressed with this article in general. Showing the amount of memory mapped in seems incredibly uninteresting & indicative of nothing. Amount of data read has some correlation with start time but loosely: if Gnome is reading 1GB sequential (it's not but for example) while KDE is 512b reads randomly (it's not) but half the size, you'd probably still want to pick Gnome.
I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments.. If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? I can understand the idea of using memory used over time as a proxy for how featureful/bloated something is, but, blind monitoring of memory usage seems pointless to me. At best it can be a capacity metric - “if you have only 2 GiB of RAM on your machine, you’re better off with XFcE vs KDE, but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used?
> I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments.. If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk?
Linux already uses all the availabe RAM for disk cache. I would rather not an app do that (except in special cases like databases, which know better than the underlying file system what needs to be cached).
If a desktop environment is using a lot of memory, this means the same memory is not available to my other apps. So yeah, even on a 32GB machine, I do care about what each app uses.
As I type this, on my 32GB GNOME system, 21GB is currently in use. Of those gnome-shell uses 2,1GB + another 700MB for gjs and zoom (which I haven't used for a couple days, it just sits in my tray) uses 1,4GB. That's 12% for doing virtually nothing (there are window managers that easily take 5% of the resources of gnome shell and one of these days I'll be fed up enough to switch; and zoom does literally nothing right now except hog memory), and that's just looking at the two top memory users.
> If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk?
I am willing to bet, that while Xfce uses less memory than Gnome or KDE, Xfce is also more snappy. I bet smaller memory use and snappiness correlate, while your comment is suggesting an anti-correlation.
I'm typing this comment from a notebook with 8Gb RAM and it is barely enough for a modern desktop - my system is running out of RAM from time to time (because modern sites are JS heavy and Firefox with multiple tabs sometimes uses all available RAM). I use i3 which has a small memory footprint and assume that with KDE/Gnome I will be running out of RAM more often.
If you have >32 Gb RAM you could ignore DE/WM memory usage but it is a relatively privileged position to be able upgrade hardware faster than software appetites rise.
I'm a CS teacher that asks their students to run multiple Linux instances in VMs. RAM usage is the biggest issue in this case. If each VM takes 1.5 GB just to open a terminal, running multiple on a laptop with only 8GB of ram becomes difficult.
Presumably because the desktop isn't what people are actually using their computers for, it's the applications on top of that.
So if you're using all of your CPU/RAM on the desktop, there's less left over for the stuff you bought the computer for
Even if it's "bloated", I've found KDE to be a far more usable DE than Gnome. KDE provides you with more features than you need (or thought you might need), but everything's made discoverable, so you don't mind. Gnome relies on extensions to meet the bare minimum, and they break after each update. Once you add the extensions, I think Gnome ends up more bloated than KDE. Don't know about Xfce and the other stuff.
KDE is definitely not bloated in any way for the amount of features and capabilities it brings out of the box. Everything you need to get to work is already built in, no extra add-ons or extensions are needed, even for power users.
My Opensuse Tumbleweed KDE idles at ~700MB RAM usage so I have no idea what the author's Fedora does with KDE that it idles at 1.4GB RAM.
I mean, I definitely expect differences between distros, but 2x the RAM usage feels really strange. There's either a bug/memory leak, or several apps are cached or running in the background.
I feel for such comparisons, it would be also fair to list the "ps -aux" for each DE somewhere so that readers can dig a bit deeper into the results if they want and see what exaclty is running
Agreed. I was a GNOME user for close to 20 years, but the version 40 did it for me - I migrated to KDE and haven't looked back. It's slightly less pretty than GNOME and has a few usability rough edges, but overall it's just a much nicer experience.
Don't know why most of the distros default to gnome. It's an absolute nightmare for usability. Without extensions even bare minimum things can't be done. If you are a windows user switching to Linux, should definitely stay away from this steaming mess of a wannabe osx clone.
People forget that the entire early MacOs, GEOS, windows DE's used to run in a matter of a couple hundred K.
The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram, and yes it could display a background picture on a HD+ level display and pretty much do everything that is possible on a modern PC that your average user is doing. The darn thing was 32-bit, meaning that the apps could never allocate more than 2G (or 3G on a tuned machine) of address space and it was enough, even for video editing/etc.
Back when FF went 64-bit/multi process I groaned because having a fixed 2G limit, which seemed terrible at the time, created a nice upper bound on how much CPU+RAM it would consume so the developers assured it ran reasonably well with those kinds of system resources. Now the sky's the limit, and if you dare limit its resource utilization via cgroups/etc it won't work 1/2 the time.
And of course its your fault if you don't have a 16 core, 32G PC. To run a text editor and a chat application.
> The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram,
It was 128MB (and XP doubled that. Which was on of the reasons I abandoned Windows XP for Linux)
> and yes it could display a background picture on a HD+ level display and pretty much do everything that is possible on a modern PC that your average user is doing.
Very very very few people had HD displays back then. I had a 19” display that could do 1024×768 and I was the envy of a few of my friends. Higher resolutions came a little later.
Also remember that icons were 8bit and 64x64 pixels. Desktops didn’t support widgets (unless you turned on ActiveDesktop but that ran like crap on even powerful machines of that era) and so on and so forth.
And that’s just the desktop. Everything was less secure back then. Telnet and rcp were still the norm. SSLv3 was still common. Keys were a lower bit length. There wasn’t as much bounds checks or any of the other stuff that have made our platforms more secure.
Sure there’s a lot of waste too. Like writing applications in browser sandboxes rather than native code. But a lot of the reason systems back then were leaner was because they needed to be rather than because modern systems are wasteful. It’s like the whole Y2K problem: why store a the year as two digits? Because memory was constrained and now it isn’t.
Source: was a software developer for Windows 2000, now I write software for Linux.
I agree with most of what you have to say, yet we have to be careful with comparisons like:
> People forget that the entire early MacOs, GEOS, windows DE's used to run in a matter of a couple hundred K.
The simplest example is to consider graphics. Early systems had limited resolution, limited colour depth, expected applications to repaint regions when necessary, and only sometimes offered primitive forms of graphics acceleration. Most people will want to see improvements on all of those fronts, yet has to be paid in memory use.
Should the jump be as big as it has been? Certainly not. On the other hand, using the earliest of GUI's as an example is misleading since the improvements I mentioned will require about 1,000 times the memory.
Ah, some good food for thought for those new Linux users that have no understanding of software engineering and caching.
Because most engineers know that memory usage of different pieces of software does not mean very much. It is very possible that that a DE boots into 100 MB, and then it's usage grows to absurd level while it is being used due to poor coding or architectural practices, while another DE might use 500 MB at boot, and then not increase very much because all its core logic is contained within this amount of memory.
Many enthusiastic people entering the Linux world, the type that run neofetch and post it on Reddit every time they jump to a new distro, are always really interested in the RAM usage figures, as if they were a real indicator of "bloat".
While I immensely appreciate how clearly it defines the methodology of this comparison, posts like this are a good way of keeping that dumb practice of running `free` after boot and drawing conclusions alive.
I have been using xfce for years now.
I would recommend people try it, no matter what your machine specs (I have a good laptop).
It is just, really, really, fast. I mean, there is a bit of latency opening Firefox or TB from cold, but everything else is just... Instant.
Tabbing windows, instant response when clicking buttons. It is night and day when comparing to windows. I use it all day, rarely reboot, and it never lags. My phone lags way more than desktop even. It is a desktop that gets out of your way :)
The downside is it makes using MS windows very frustrating (I keep thinking I must have missed clicked due to delays), but I don't have to use windows much thankfully.
I used XFCE for a few years. My biggest issue with it was that my work machine is a laptop that I have configured as dual-screen with an external monitor. I have a need to dock and undock several times a day as I alternate between working at my desk, go to meetings, work from somewhere else in the building, etc. Maybe it's better now, but back then XFCE was terrible at figuring out where windows are supposed to go as displays came and went. GNOME (hell, even GNOME 2) to its credit, always handled this flawlessly. KDE was iffy for a long time but now it's fine.
+1. Been using Xubuntu LTS for my desktops and laptops since 10.04 (I now see that's after 2010). My experience concours with yours. Xfce is excellent for me, hope it stays this way. I see my kids use Windows. Some things in modern Windows strike me as insane nowdays (been a Windows user too, since Windows 3). Hope I'm never forced in a position where I have to change away from Xfce.
I'm actually less interested in how much RAM the desktop uses in normal usage, and more interested in how gracefully it handles curveballs. For instance, some time ago I accidentally pointed a file manager at a directory containing a massive JPEG image (I think it was a photo of decapped chip, or something of that nature). The file manager immediately decided to generate a thumbnail, ate all the physical RAM, and triggered a swapstorm that made it next to impossible to find and kill the offending process. It took best part of five minutes to regain control of the computer.
I still think that the desktops eat a huge amount of resources. Win98 ran correcly with 32mb and you had more or less the same features of nowadays desktops.
My Ubuntu KDE installation uses ~700MB RAM at idle with a fresh login and I've been using it with Wayland for years now without the problems the author describes.
My Steam Deck KDE uses ~1.3GB, more than half of which is taken by the baloo_file_extractor process.
Apparently doing background indexing of file contents gobbles RAM. Not sure if that's the problem with the author's setup?
Interesting, MATE should be under 400MB or less if you do not enable optional HUD or tray resident applications. Even in 64bit, it ran just fine on a pi2b with 512MB ram, and was about 340MB at boot-up with marco (no colord, HUD terminal, or evolution mail etc.).
The issue arises in how linux reuses ram pages for shared objects. While you may have many processes... the actual incremental program size can be very small. One of the many reasons oversized kernel ram cache/buffer sizes can help with performance (often as high as 40% on small flash memory io-constrained devices).
A heavily customized MATE on Ubuntu LTS OS is part of the standard developer platform I recommend. This takes a bit of effort, but there are benefits to having everyone on the exact same hardware, OS, and compiler version. i.e. cloning/repairing a workstation snapshot takes 30 minutes.
What on earth requires to eat 1.5 gig of RAM?
I'm writing this under KDE 22.08 and plasmashell took 700m RES.
KWin 180m RES. Why we were able to server the same windows in 90 with 64m RAM total, now window manager requires 180m. No composition is running.
Functionality basically the same, no user experience breakthrough. And yet.
I would be fine with high memory usage if it was almost all shared memory, but what really annoys me is that it isn't. Also the lack of cross platform UI toolkits(not just Windows-Linux cross platform, but really such that they integrate with KDE, gnome, xfce, and anything else as well as Windows). Take just one example, system tray. There is no common interface for it. Same with many other things. Don't get me wrong, Linux in the desktop today is usable, but it leaves a lot be desired.
I would like to see a similar comparison, but for the latency of completing various actions, like startup time, switching windows, opening the launcher menu, navigating to a subdirectory...
These are the things that matter to me - much moreso than RAM usage. My informal anecdotal experience is that XFCE latency is nearly always imperceptible, whereas GNOME latency is nearly always perceptible.
While memory usage is not a perfect metric of how "bloated" a piece of software is, I would't say it's useless either. That memory isn't just sitting there, it's being read, written, moved, meaning the software uses it to do things which also take up CPU and other resources. There is no escaping that doing more stuff in the background means less prioritization for your active usage so the software feels (and is) slow to respond.
Now if that background/automated stuff is useful to you then that's that, you can't have something for nothing. But if you don't care for most of it I don't see why you would keep it around and not benefit from a snappy system. If you've never tried using a window manager instead of Desktop Environment give it a try, it's extremely simple and you can have both in parallel. See if you miss anything from DEs, I for one don't.
[+] [-] whalesalad|3 years ago|reply
Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics. A unified clipboard (kb shortcuts as well as shared buffer), proper 4k rendering/scaling at a nuclear level, etc. This is my biggest gripe with Linux.
I would ditch macOS entirely if I could do the following: 1. complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere (there are hacks for this, but they are hacks), 2. proper 4k rendering (no blurry stuff) with consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications, 3. the ability to copy and paste text into or out of a terminal without fuss.
I don't care about X11 vs Wayland.
All this considered - and I can't believe I am about to say this - Windows 11 is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be and I kinda like it. Might need to go see a doctor I am starting to say funny things.
[+] [-] ryukafalz|3 years ago|reply
> I don't care about X11 vs Wayland.
It sounds like you might care though, albeit not directly. That blurriness is often the result of attempting to use fractional scaling (i.e. not an integer multiple like 200%, 300%, etc). This is common on 4k displays as many are too small for 100% scaling to be readable but too big for 200%. You can do fractional scaling on X11 but Wayland typically does it better, and without the blurriness.
[+] [-] j1elo|3 years ago|reply
I'm flabbergasted that this is a question that should even be asked. Linux Desktop is so advanced and at the same time so lacking in stupidly simple matters such as this one, but here we are, look at how complex the answer marked as solution looks here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/285689/increase-mouse-wheel-...
(hint: the reasonable expectation, IMHO, would be to "open System Settings, go to Mouse Settings, and change a slider")
I've been in love with Linux Mint's Cinnamon and the very good balance between functionality and out-of-the-box experience. But no, the system settings don't allow to change the scroll speed. I won't complain, but it does confuse me...
[+] [-] unethical_ban|3 years ago|reply
I know it's hard to tune a good trackpad profile with such varying hardware, but it sure.would be nice to get a MacBook like smoothness on a Linux DE.
And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend.
I'm okay with fedora on my laptop, and I must say I've gotten used to Gnome. There is a tweak tool for gnome that allows for adjusting some things I think should be tweakable and discoverable by default.
[+] [-] BrotherBisquick|3 years ago|reply
Have you tried Wayland?
Look, I'm not an evangelist, but it solves so many annoying little problems with X11 that I never want to go back. You don't realize how much of a hacked-together, obsolete kludge that X11 is until you use an alternative.
[+] [-] therealmarv|3 years ago|reply
I also use a customized layout (mostly international English with shortcuts for German Umlauts and Y and Z remapped to eachother). It definitely works in most modern Linux desktops to use a "custom keyboard layout" like described here. There are many guides which are outdated on the topic. It's a hack and also not super simple to execute (you only need to do it once) but it is persistent and system-wide in all programs at least:
https://askubuntu.com/a/483026/28810
[+] [-] Ruq|3 years ago|reply
I agree that vanilla GNOME just isn't good enough. But especially for Wayland, GNOME is far superior to KDE in terms of stability and glitch-freeness.
[+] [-] jonnycomputer|3 years ago|reply
Yes, please.
[+] [-] dynamic_sausage|3 years ago|reply
I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get your preferred keybindings:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension
[+] [-] dynamic_sausage|3 years ago|reply
I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get what you want, too:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension
[+] [-] graymatters|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoyohello13|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csumtin|3 years ago|reply
https://github.com/csumtin/cua
[+] [-] sigzero|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rektide|3 years ago|reply
> consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications
You can get fairly close to this if you use gnome or kde specific distros.
But you're generally asking: please don't be open source. Please don't have a bazaar of ideas. Please build me one big cathedral. You ask here is antithetical to the purpose of whom you are asking. On most general purpose distributions, users probably ought to end up having multiple different UI elements.
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere
I actually like this idea a lot, because it suggests a certain system-wide malleability layer that, at the moment, doesn't exist. Anywhere, on any system, at all. How would you go about making your Mac have consistent Windows keybindings, for example? I'd be interested to see how people thought we might tackle this, generally.
Folks could make a custom Linux distro that pre-configures each app to be Mac like. I think that's the best chance. But jeeze it seems like an unholy crusade to support a very specific niche, a niche not known for participating & giving back & relishing what we are & do. Awfully big bridge to build & it will forever have some rickety-ness to it.
You could use something like https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools to read certain Mac key-combos or what not and rewrite them. But what would you rewrite to? I don't have a good sheet of what it is you'd be asking for or wanting to just work.
My spitball idea for how we'd really fix this: I'd like each app to register with a dbus service all of the "actions"/commands it can do, and allow rebinding & activation of the actions over dbus. Maybe even actions actually are just dbus methods, but annotated somehow, to describe their hotkeys or to give them human friendly names? Anyhow, whatever the impl, there could be a central "hotkey manager" that could see all keyboard bindings & let us top-down manage them. There'd need to be some way for "Save" in Kate to be combined/grouped together with "Save" in Firefox, somehow, for this to be helpful. Managing this namespace of actions would be a terror of a problem, utterly absurd, in my view, which implies strongly the difficulty of the ask here I'm trying to respond to, but I actually think it'd be a pretty noble & cool effort. In part because of what it relates to:
System command apps. Tools like dmenu/alfred/albert/quicksilver are meant as general top down interfaces, are often scriptable/extensible/deeply configurable to allow fast access & control of a variety of actions. By recognizing keybindings as what they are: actions/commands, and suggesting that the "actions"/commands of an app get bubbled up to the system layer & get managed there, we just make these top-commanders more powerful. There's also an extreme parallel here to voice-agent systems, like Chrome Assistant, Alexa, Siri, where apps present actions & the system is in charge of taking user input and translating it into actuation; they too are directory systems of actions, rather than having each app in isolation.
> ability to copy and paste into or out of a terminal without fuss
Copy/paste just works for me? Not sure what the problem statement is here, and/or what terminals you've suffered under.
> Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics.
100%. My main personal laptop is 4GB. I run sway which is low resource consumption, but in general resource consumption seems like a huge non-factor to me. In general, Linux isn't going to win by being more conservative. Pining about resource consumption is self-rewarding, self-gratifying: one feels zealous & virtuous, like you have the true cause amid a fallen world & are the path of the defender. But IMO it's mostly detracting & abusing the good & necessary & vital suffusion of creativity & possibility into the world. The scope of consumption is not that bad. And we have the important task of figuring out where to go still ahead of us: I'd rather be conservative once we have better ideas of what works, at any resource budget, & hone back down from there. Rather than forever dance around this maxima/minima we're on & tune for what we have.
I'm also unimpressed with this article in general. Showing the amount of memory mapped in seems incredibly uninteresting & indicative of nothing. Amount of data read has some correlation with start time but loosely: if Gnome is reading 1GB sequential (it's not but for example) while KDE is 512b reads randomly (it's not) but half the size, you'd probably still want to pick Gnome.
[+] [-] FpUser|3 years ago|reply
Then just replicate Win98 desktop. good ergonomics has nothing to do with high resource usage.
[+] [-] reacharavindh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senko|3 years ago|reply
Linux already uses all the availabe RAM for disk cache. I would rather not an app do that (except in special cases like databases, which know better than the underlying file system what needs to be cached).
If a desktop environment is using a lot of memory, this means the same memory is not available to my other apps. So yeah, even on a 32GB machine, I do care about what each app uses.
As I type this, on my 32GB GNOME system, 21GB is currently in use. Of those gnome-shell uses 2,1GB + another 700MB for gjs and zoom (which I haven't used for a couple days, it just sits in my tray) uses 1,4GB. That's 12% for doing virtually nothing (there are window managers that easily take 5% of the resources of gnome shell and one of these days I'll be fed up enough to switch; and zoom does literally nothing right now except hog memory), and that's just looking at the two top memory users.
[+] [-] sampo|3 years ago|reply
I am willing to bet, that while Xfce uses less memory than Gnome or KDE, Xfce is also more snappy. I bet smaller memory use and snappiness correlate, while your comment is suggesting an anti-correlation.
[+] [-] citrin_ru|3 years ago|reply
If you have >32 Gb RAM you could ignore DE/WM memory usage but it is a relatively privileged position to be able upgrade hardware faster than software appetites rise.
[+] [-] mesebrec|3 years ago|reply
So I for one am very happy with these benchmarks.
[+] [-] ChrisRR|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogogmad|3 years ago|reply
It's not an apples to apples comparison.
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|3 years ago|reply
My Opensuse Tumbleweed KDE idles at ~700MB RAM usage so I have no idea what the author's Fedora does with KDE that it idles at 1.4GB RAM.
I mean, I definitely expect differences between distros, but 2x the RAM usage feels really strange. There's either a bug/memory leak, or several apps are cached or running in the background.
I feel for such comparisons, it would be also fair to list the "ps -aux" for each DE somewhere so that readers can dig a bit deeper into the results if they want and see what exaclty is running
[+] [-] The_Colonel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petepete|3 years ago|reply
I use none and it's fine for me.
[+] [-] allisdust|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chakkepolja|3 years ago|reply
Also, LXQT starts up instantly from login screen, KDE takes 2-10 seconds even if I disable as many things as possible from settings.
Apart from that, I have a generally high opinion of KDE.
[+] [-] StillBored|3 years ago|reply
The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram, and yes it could display a background picture on a HD+ level display and pretty much do everything that is possible on a modern PC that your average user is doing. The darn thing was 32-bit, meaning that the apps could never allocate more than 2G (or 3G on a tuned machine) of address space and it was enough, even for video editing/etc.
Back when FF went 64-bit/multi process I groaned because having a fixed 2G limit, which seemed terrible at the time, created a nice upper bound on how much CPU+RAM it would consume so the developers assured it ran reasonably well with those kinds of system resources. Now the sky's the limit, and if you dare limit its resource utilization via cgroups/etc it won't work 1/2 the time.
And of course its your fault if you don't have a 16 core, 32G PC. To run a text editor and a chat application.
[+] [-] hnlmorg|3 years ago|reply
It was 128MB (and XP doubled that. Which was on of the reasons I abandoned Windows XP for Linux)
> and yes it could display a background picture on a HD+ level display and pretty much do everything that is possible on a modern PC that your average user is doing.
Very very very few people had HD displays back then. I had a 19” display that could do 1024×768 and I was the envy of a few of my friends. Higher resolutions came a little later.
Also remember that icons were 8bit and 64x64 pixels. Desktops didn’t support widgets (unless you turned on ActiveDesktop but that ran like crap on even powerful machines of that era) and so on and so forth.
And that’s just the desktop. Everything was less secure back then. Telnet and rcp were still the norm. SSLv3 was still common. Keys were a lower bit length. There wasn’t as much bounds checks or any of the other stuff that have made our platforms more secure.
Sure there’s a lot of waste too. Like writing applications in browser sandboxes rather than native code. But a lot of the reason systems back then were leaner was because they needed to be rather than because modern systems are wasteful. It’s like the whole Y2K problem: why store a the year as two digits? Because memory was constrained and now it isn’t.
Source: was a software developer for Windows 2000, now I write software for Linux.
[+] [-] II2II|3 years ago|reply
> People forget that the entire early MacOs, GEOS, windows DE's used to run in a matter of a couple hundred K.
The simplest example is to consider graphics. Early systems had limited resolution, limited colour depth, expected applications to repaint regions when necessary, and only sometimes offered primitive forms of graphics acceleration. Most people will want to see improvements on all of those fronts, yet has to be paid in memory use.
Should the jump be as big as it has been? Certainly not. On the other hand, using the earliest of GUI's as an example is misleading since the improvements I mentioned will require about 1,000 times the memory.
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
Because most engineers know that memory usage of different pieces of software does not mean very much. It is very possible that that a DE boots into 100 MB, and then it's usage grows to absurd level while it is being used due to poor coding or architectural practices, while another DE might use 500 MB at boot, and then not increase very much because all its core logic is contained within this amount of memory.
Many enthusiastic people entering the Linux world, the type that run neofetch and post it on Reddit every time they jump to a new distro, are always really interested in the RAM usage figures, as if they were a real indicator of "bloat".
While I immensely appreciate how clearly it defines the methodology of this comparison, posts like this are a good way of keeping that dumb practice of running `free` after boot and drawing conclusions alive.
[+] [-] roomey|3 years ago|reply
It is just, really, really, fast. I mean, there is a bit of latency opening Firefox or TB from cold, but everything else is just... Instant.
Tabbing windows, instant response when clicking buttons. It is night and day when comparing to windows. I use it all day, rarely reboot, and it never lags. My phone lags way more than desktop even. It is a desktop that gets out of your way :)
The downside is it makes using MS windows very frustrating (I keep thinking I must have missed clicked due to delays), but I don't have to use windows much thankfully.
[+] [-] bityard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huggingmouth|3 years ago|reply
Have they made any progress in porting into Wayland yet?
[+] [-] ljosifov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robinsonb5|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdtrooper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marmarama|3 years ago|reply
My Steam Deck KDE uses ~1.3GB, more than half of which is taken by the baloo_file_extractor process.
Apparently doing background indexing of file contents gobbles RAM. Not sure if that's the problem with the author's setup?
[+] [-] Joel_Mckay|3 years ago|reply
The issue arises in how linux reuses ram pages for shared objects. While you may have many processes... the actual incremental program size can be very small. One of the many reasons oversized kernel ram cache/buffer sizes can help with performance (often as high as 40% on small flash memory io-constrained devices).
A heavily customized MATE on Ubuntu LTS OS is part of the standard developer platform I recommend. This takes a bit of effort, but there are benefits to having everyone on the exact same hardware, OS, and compiler version. i.e. cloning/repairing a workstation snapshot takes 30 minutes.
[+] [-] rmrfchik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Roark66|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wooptoo|3 years ago|reply
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.18/roadmap
[+] [-] vermaden|3 years ago|reply
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/07/12/desktop-environmen...
[+] [-] alganet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Schlaefer|3 years ago|reply
Now do it again on a different distro which packages different default apps and services, and see how these values differ by multiple hundreds of MB.
[+] [-] valeg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl6|3 years ago|reply
These are the things that matter to me - much moreso than RAM usage. My informal anecdotal experience is that XFCE latency is nearly always imperceptible, whereas GNOME latency is nearly always perceptible.
[+] [-] drpixie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trabant00|3 years ago|reply
Now if that background/automated stuff is useful to you then that's that, you can't have something for nothing. But if you don't care for most of it I don't see why you would keep it around and not benefit from a snappy system. If you've never tried using a window manager instead of Desktop Environment give it a try, it's extremely simple and you can have both in parallel. See if you miss anything from DEs, I for one don't.