How is it relevant if the DE consumes 300mb or 400mb of RAM when idle? (honest question)

I’d like to see a CPU/power consumption comparison. I’d love to see how Pantheon, KDE and the new version of Gnome holds up. Maybe I’ll do such a test myself!

My workstation has 32Gb of ram, my laptop 16Gb. RAM is normally not an issue. When I run data intense stuff, that needs all RAM, I run without a DE.

For you RAM is normally not an issue. Plenty of machines that would need Xubuntu / Lubuntu are having RAM issues. 100MB is a whole lot!

Honestly, if you have 32GB of RAM, I don't even see what would you save by running without a desktop environment: get an extra 1.5% extra RAM?

I've restored my old machine last year and I've been surprised how much 'value for RAM' you could get years ago. I could run Windows 95 on the little machine with Office 97 and do something with it. While a modern Linux doesn't even have a kernel for 16MB of RAM, not to mention an office suite.

I run outside the DE because I have had more problems with CUDA stuff hanging the computer during long running jobs when running inside of a DE. Nothing worse than waking up to check results of some long job in the morning only to realised it crashed 15 minutes in.

You are right, of course, about it not being a problem for those two machines. I didn’t realise Xububtu and Lububtu profiled themselves as low requirements OS’.

AFAIK, Xubuntu and Lubuntu are targeted to low spec (think at virtual machines) or old machines where the RAM usage is significant.

They still sell computers with 4gb of ram, so it doesn't even have to be an old computer.

Virtual machines? My laptop has 32GB of ram and my workstation has 64GB. If I need 1GB instead of 2GB per VM, then I have a lot more breathing room.

For me it's input lag. DEs and applications with high memory requirements feel sluggish. Maybe that have to do with L1/2/3 cache misses, which are more likely for bigger applications, whereas some WMs might fit entirely into the CPU cache.

I would hazard a guess that this is more a sense of memory-heavy DEs prioritizing features over efficiency in general, rather than being a causal relationship.

Some people don't have that much ram? Ram is still expensive, especially when bundled with laptops.

It would be a better comparison if both systems were on equal footing. In this demonstration the Xubuntu system has swap enabled and the Lubuntu system doesn't. The load averages should also not be taken into consideration as the Lubuntu system has only been up for ~1 minute and the Xubuntu system has been up for ~20.

So... Do you mean xubuntu could have a better score or lxqt?

I don't mean either, I just mean the methodology isn't great.

I have been told the kde has similar (or maybe even lower) footprint despite doing more.

Yes, despite all the bad advertising and all the persistent ghost (that just won't go away) KDE's Plasma as evolved a lot over the years and is now very lite while doing a lot of things (and if you have a sluggish Plasma DE, then your computer or distro DOES HAVE A PROBLEM that is not KDE's fault)

for me KDE plasma isn't sluggish but cold starting apps like dolphin is significantly slower than xfce's thunar, thunar it's pretty much instant while dolphin is about 1.5s

If you care about 1.5s and other measures in the same sizes, then this post is for sure of interest to you, because you can save 100MB+ of RAM and have a perfectly functional and beauty DE with LXQt!

By the way, I use Plasma on my everyday job and I can't complain of it.

It's fast, feature full and works very well. (I never seem to understand how people complain of it being slow, bloated, whatever... Mine isn't!!) The thing I love the most in it is being able to set it in whatever way I want. I never get tired of it and so far it hasn't let me down. I'm always amazed that, whatever crazy idea I think of that can speed up my work, or make me more comfortable about my DE, they have an option for it!!!

It's a kind of freedom I can't find anywhere else.

For older computers where every MB counts (plasma uses around 350-500mb), or for people who don't care about extreme customizations (that are happy with an XP/7 like DE), then LXQt is used

No, I'm coming from the other way - if I have 6700k OC'ed to 4.6Ghz, 32GBs of RAM and an SSD, i want all these basic apps to show up instantaneously. I think I've payed enough money for this kind of experience not to suck.

Also time matters for me because I am mostly using my keyboard, chaining commands, so I start imputing stuff right after I open it and if those commands are missed because the application is still loading it sucks.

LOL!!!

Fair enough!!!

Have you tried PCmanFM and LXQt? I think you'll be pleased

I've tried XFCE and thunar(both of which are incredibly fast and I loved them), but I've switched to KDE this year because there was always one annoying bug (last one was with large screenshots https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20674473 ). I've also tried LXDE but the window manager seemed very basic compared to XFCE, but I haven't tried LXQT.

I'll do another set of tests once Ubuntu (or rather PopOS) 20.04 LTS releases.

Let me suggest you to, when you do try Lubuntu with LXQt, use kwin as the WM.

It's very lite (you won't notice the difference when compared to openbox) and it's feature full/very powerful.

LXQt devs have mentioned they will probably migrate to kwin when Wayland arrives for good.

(and forget lxde. LXQt is the future ;)

Why run a full DE, when all you need is openbox, tint2 and conky?

Well not everyone is a techie.

Most people don't mind having a lite DE as long as it's not too ugly (or feeling like win98), has a familiar GUI and is not hard to configure.

OpenBox (beside being feature complete - no new features allowed and locked with x11) does not have that "familiar" GUI.

But for more techie people, openbox is a solution, or the new sway or even the terminal!

No Mate in the mix?

Apparently Mate uses more RAM that Xfce or LXQt so, usually, the competition is between this two.

But i agree that a Mate comparison would be nice as well!