Maybe the resources required to run just one bash instance (and whatever you run within it) is lower than the resources required to run whatever DE you had on L

Maybe the resources required to run just one bash instance (and whatever you run within it) is lower than the resources required to run whatever DE you had on Linux (Unity is notorious) enough for it to show? When I asked how you tested, I was looking for a more detailed answer: what were the environments, the hardwares, what does the cli app you used do (CPU, IO, allocation etc.) (this you answered), etc. --- I normally run a KDE session, which takes up some memory and the KDE ecosystem aren't the lightest users of syscalls (I'm looking at you Konsole), but when I need sheer perf (even for benchmarks), I kill all KDE sessions and switch to an openbox session running st.