These numbers are bad because they are not really about what desktop environments use but about what the entire OS will use since they rely heavily on the OS co

These numbers are bad because they are not really about what desktop environments use but about what the entire OS will use since they rely heavily on the OS configuration for that. A much better approach to check how much resources DEs use is to capture the memory use before and after the DE itself starts, ignoring even X server (as this too can use different memory depending, e.g., on the drivers, hardware and/or other configuration parameters - all of which are outside the control of a DE). As an example by placing `free > free-pre` in my .xinitrc before starting Window Maker and then `free > free-post` at the end of Window Maker's own startup script (which is run after the desktop is launched) i found that my WM setup uses 11MB of RAM (on a 64bit x86-64 machine - it'd most likely use less on a 32bit machine). This is however also on my setup where i have a bunch of dockapps launched that aren't part of a default Window Maker installation - disabling those puts the resources Window Maker needs down to 8MB of RAM. These are way more realistic for Window Maker (and basically what i'd expect it to use) since my OS (openSUSE) at startup uses around 3% of my available RAM (32GB) and i'm certain that Window Maker doesn't need 1GB of RAM to work - which makes sense since pretty much all of that is used by other processes, like systemd, postgres, bunch of managers, etc.