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Over the years I’ve seen a lot of poorly made comparisons of Linux Desktop Environments in terms of system usage and in this article I want to make things right once and for all.
Let’s start with a methodology which absolutely needs to be defined because we want reproducible results, not something which is random and user dependent.
For testing Fedora spins are used – you can find download links below in the comparison table. Fedora normally offers quite fresh if not the freshest software – we need something which is relevant as of now, December 2022, not December 2012.
Post installation the system will be fully upgraded and rebooted – that’s how users will run it anyways.
Tests will be performed under a VM, VirtualBox 6.1.40. Why? People’s hardware varies greatly, it’s impossible to predict whether your system has a fast dedicated GPU or a built-in one. This could result in different RAM/VRAM usage patterns. VirtualBox 7.0 will not be used as it’s still considered beta quality software.
A VM will get a 16GB disk drive, a four-core vCPU, 128MB of VRAM and 4096MB of RAM running at [email protected] resolution. SWAP will not be used as it behaves unpredictably.
Gnome and KDE will be tested under Wayland and Xorg. All other DEs will be running under the Xorg server, i.e. in pure X11 mode.
To assess the system RAM use without a desktop environment running, the system will be booted into IceWM which has a very miminal footprint yet offers a sort of usable graphical environment.
Once logged in, default file manager and terminal emulatar applications will be started and that’s it. Most users use both a lot, while it’s hard to assess what other applications are
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