bloat? [LWN.net]

bloat?

Posted Feb 21, 2007 23:53 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
In reply to: Xfce 4.4: The best lightweight desktop environment (Linux.com) by twiens
Parent article: Xfce 4.4: The best lightweight desktop environment (Linux.com)

Inspired by this article, I tried installing xubuntu-desktop on my 384MB Kubuntu laptop
last night, to compare memory usage of XFCE with KDE. Granted, since my laptop is
running Ubuntu Dapper (released last summer), it was XFCE 4.3 instead of 4.4 (but with
Thunar), but I haven't heard anyone say that 4.4 uses less memory than 4.3.

I normally run with a terminal window, a browser window, a mail window, and a bunch of
panel applets for seeing some status information. Once I got all this set up in XFCE as I
have in KDE (with firefox and thunderbird in place of konqueror and kmail), I found that I
was using slightly more memory and swap in XFCE than in KDE. Not much more; they
were pretty close.

Conclusion: With my usual application environment, KDE is no more bloated than XFCE
is. (On the other hand, I was happy to see that XFCE no longer looks and acts like the
ugly stepsister of CDE.)

This comparison came to similar conclusions:
http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

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bloat?

Posted Feb 22, 2007 0:12 UTC (Thu) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link]

This is not surprising since konqueror and kmail consume only a fraction of the memory of Firefox and Thunderbird, even with the entire KDE subsystem loaded. The Mozilla framework is to blamed for the higher memory footprint in your scenario, not XFCE. A better comparison might have been Sylpheed + a hypothetical GTK-only web browser.

bloat?

Posted Feb 22, 2007 0:31 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

You're right that is isn't XFCE's fault specifically, but it's KDE's advantage to have a
high-quality mail client and web browser that don't add much memory use to the system.

I used to use Sylpheed. Not bad for a simple graphical mail client, but both Kmail and
Thunderbird blow it out of the water. I have no desire to go back there.

Your use of "hypothetical" helps make my point as well. Since there isn't such a thing
that doesn't depend on either Gnome libraries or Mozilla framework (RIP Galeon 1.2), I
take what I can get (for similar functionality). What I can get results in no memory gain
over KDE.

Granted, as far as XFCE itself goes, it is impressive at giving functionality equivalent to
KDE at a lower memory cost. But I need a high-quality mail client and browser running.
The only way to get that in XFCE is to add either the Mozilla framework, the KDE
libraries, or the Gnome libraries, with no net memory reduction compared to an all-KDE
environment.

Of course, if I used Firefox rather than Konqueror as my browser in KDE, the story would
be different.