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I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments.. If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see i

I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments.. If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? I can understand the idea of using memory used over time as a proxy for how featureful/bloated something is, but, blind monitoring of memory usage seems pointless to me. At best it can be a capacity metric - “if you have only 2 GiB of RAM on your machine, you’re better off with XFcE vs KDE, but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used?

scarygliders 4y ago
Some people can use some quite RAM-hungry applications, therefore the more RAM available to those the better.
- onli 4y ago
  Not some people - everyone uses a web browser.
  - scarygliders 4y ago
    Indeed, that is included within the subset of "quite RAM-hungry applications" :)
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Since we read that, there is a high chance (not total)... This page weights in the staggering order of 16MB on Lynx!
- zokier 4y ago
  I'd imagine most people running RAM hungry applications would have enough RAM so that saving single gigabyte is not really relevant
  - c-cube 4y ago
    I'm horrified by the words "saving a single gigabyte". What have we come to? Wasting a billion bytes is a small deal now? :-/
  - scarygliders 4y ago
    Okay here's a typical example... Try running Stable-Diffusion, specifically the Automatic1111 version, and merging various checkpoints. On my 32GB PC, after doing a few merges, the linux kernel is beginning to use many GBs of swap. Further attempts at merging checkpoints can result in OOM kicking in. If I can save a GB or two, that can help get those final mergings accomplished. Otherwise, it's a case of restarting the application and continuing from there. An alternative is to keep increasing the available swap space. Mine is at 10GB by default. The problem with that is you can end up waiting for the system to swap stuff in and out, and this can result in system pauses. The other alternative of course is to buy more RAM. And here was me thinking 32GB was a decent amount ;)
sgsag33 4y ago
Err why should I want my UI eat up my RAM - it's a resource. I also don't buy this argument that its OK for modern OSes to eat up 3-4GB of RAM and that it doesn't matter and that it frees it if you need it...
sampo 4y ago
> If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? I am willing to bet, that while Xfce uses less memory than Gnome or KDE, Xfce is also more snappy. I bet smaller memory use and snappiness correlate, while your comment is suggesting an anti-correlation.
- rockyj 4y ago
  Yeah, but Xfce also has fewer features and less polish. e.g. I have had regular problems with connecting multiple monitors or from restarting a monitor etc. KDE also on the other hand has more useful applications pre-loaded (for minimalists it might be "bloat") but like others said, if you have the disk and memory why not get a more useable DE.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - collyw 4y ago
    Not used KDE for ages, but personally I find XFCE and Cinnamon more usable than the Gnome desktops. But then I am pretty old school.
- reacharavindh 4y ago
  Hmm. I can see how my argument came across as anti-correlation. But, my intent was to highlight how unreliable “memory used” is as a metric for how good&usable a desktop environment is. Not doubting whether xfce could be snappier than KDE while using less resources. It could also be doing far less right?
  - fuzzy2 4y ago
    > But, my intent was to highlight how unreliable “memory used” is as a metric for how good&usable a desktop environment is. I don't think this is what TFA is about at all. It is merely comparing resource usage, I don't see it making any other statements. This is useful if you must decide what to use on a less powerful PC.
zozbot234 4y ago
If you have the hardware, your disk reads get cached anyway. It's almost never the case that RAM goes totally unused.
_8j50 4y ago
I have other applications that need the memory. Just open slack in one tab and it eats up 4gb. I need the DE to get out of the way as much as possible. I use lxqt which isn't very impressive but light enough. Awesomewm is really nice too for a tiling environment. The best lightweight was Enlightnment 17, I have no idea why they just dropped off the radar.
- mikecoles 4y ago
  I've long been a fan of Enlightenment. It's still going well. https://www.enlightenment.org/download https://www.enlightenment.org/download
- UncleSlacky 4y ago
  Bodhi's fork of E17 (Moksha) is still pretty popular. I think the Moksha dev team are of the opinion that Enlightenment's development post-17 has been a mistake. https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/ https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
- somat 4y ago
  Wasn't Enlightnment the opposite of a lightweight environment. That is, if I remember correctly it included every single visual gimmick, it's only saving grace was the it was coded fairly efficiently.
mesebrec 4y ago
I'm a CS teacher that asks their students to run multiple Linux instances in VMs. RAM usage is the biggest issue in this case. If each VM takes 1.5 GB just to open a terminal, running multiple on a laptop with only 8GB of ram becomes difficult. So I for one am very happy with these benchmarks.
- pca006132 4y ago
  Why not ask them to run headless VMs? they can even ssh into remotw instances so they don't even have to download and setup the VMs manually!
  - nix23 4y ago
    Yeah or just make a account on sdf.org. And why more then one GUI-linux-vm?...i personally would just connect (ssh or mosh) to sdf (NetBSD) for C, sh, python etc on sdf.org. BSD's and linux are 90% the same and the rest is not hard to learn. >INSTRUCTOR (free) >STUDENT (free) https://sdf.org/?join https://sdf.org/?join
    - anthk 4y ago
      You are at sdf? Cool :) I have an account, but I am not validated yet. On VM resources... FFS, Alpine could run under 128MB of RAM, enough to do basic configurations.
      - nix23 4y ago
        >You are at sdf? Yes ;) for netbsd and plan9/9front (9p.sdf.org) Got my account ~3 years ago an validated it immediately, it's fast and simple (at least with paypal). For plan9 you don't need validation just create a new account (same mail-adress if you will and different pw) https://sdf.org/plan9/ https://sdf.org/plan9/ >On VM resources... FFS, Alpine could run under 128MB of RAM, enough to do basic configurations. Yeah Alpine is really nice...and musl ;)
    - wink 4y ago
      Interesting how you'd infer that a simple user shell (remote) would tick all the boxes I'd associate with running a VM. Root access, networking (between the VMs), works offline, can (doesn't have to) use GUI programs.
thayne 4y ago
It depends on how you are using your desktop. More memory used for the DE means less memory for other stuff, like running VMs or development servers, compiling and dev tools, games or media applications, a browser, and even just caching disk files in memory.
LoganDark 4y ago
GNOME 43 on my Fedora Silverblue 37 (and presumably all other installations?) takes 6 GiB of RAM at minimum. It's sort of sad. Also I run it from a flash drive.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  When they decided to reboot their extensions in JS, that pretty much done it for me.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    It's annoying that extensions like Blur My Shell can't fix the critical issues with the blurring because they're written in high-level JavaScript and can only use the bindings that GTK gives them. So I'll have to deal without application blur, but at least the fact that I can blur some things (like the overview) is really nice.
- vetinari 4y ago
  Not really; Fedora 37 with GNOME 43 inside a VM with 4 GB/no swap uses 1.9 GB RAM for a fully running desktop.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    Ugh, it appears that I misremembered. GNOME takes about 113MB of real memory, and 6GB of virtual. Still extremely scary for systems without overcommit enabled, but with overcommit, not terrible.
senko 4y ago
> I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments.. If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? Linux already uses all the availabe RAM for disk cache. I would rather not an app do that (except in special cases like databases, which know better than the underlying file system what needs to be cached). If a desktop environment is using a lot of memory, this means the same memory is not available to my other apps. So yeah, even on a 32GB machine, I do care about what each app uses. As I type this, on my 32GB GNOME system, 21GB is currently in use. Of those gnome-shell uses 2,1GB + another 700MB for gjs and zoom (which I haven't used for a couple days, it just sits in my tray) uses 1,4GB. That's 12% for doing virtually nothing (there are window managers that easily take 5% of the resources of gnome shell and one of these days I'll be fed up enough to switch; and zoom does literally nothing right now except hog memory), and that's just looking at the two top memory users.
- eptcyka 4y ago
  Whilst some components inherently use more memory than other viable alternatives (gnome-shell's JS runtime), gnome-shell generally has a lot more components and thus features than the more barebones window managers - and this should always be pointed out. Of course, if you are certain you will never need the extra functionality, then don't use Gnome. But generally, I don't think it makes sense to compare plain window managers with desktop environments. I think an interesting comparison would also be looking at quartz, the macOS window manager/desktop environment.
  - senko 4y ago
    You can use Gnome with other window managers. I was talking specifically about gnome-shell.
  - dman 4y ago
    xfce isnt just a window manager.
  - inetknght 4y ago
    > gnome-shell generally has a lot more components and thus features than the more barebones window managers My experience with gnome-shell is that it is in fact a huge massive bloat for what it provides. What features does it provide that more barebones window managers don't provide?
atoav 4y ago
Depends on your application tho. On a Raspberry Pi that is a server and has a GUI only for occasional use these metrics might be more crucial. If you have a high powered laptop that you just use for browsing, you might not care so much about anything at all.
- _trampeltier 4y ago
  This. Or if you use for something an old laptop, there may be better options than KDE. But that's the cool thing with Linux Windows Manager. It's your choice.
KingLancelot 4y ago
yxhuvud 4y ago
I'd be a lot more interested in CPU usage, gnome is pretty terrible there and tend to either stutter, or worse - freeze for a while, quite often. It be interesting to see if the alternatives are as bad.
- pmontra 4y ago
  Which GNOME are you using and on which hardware? I don't remember those problems with my old laptop from 2006 and with the one I'm currently using from 2014. Crashes happens, maybe not every year. I'm working with an Intel i7 4xxx, 32 GB RAM, SSD, GNOME shell 3.36, Ubuntu 20.04, NVIDIA Quadro K1100M. However I might have skipped some problems because I've been on GNOME Flashback for a while, from 2014 to 2020, while I waited for enough extensions to appear to recreated the saner (for me) environment before GNOME 3.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    I have an older Ivy-bridge laptop from 2012 (Thinkpad T430s, 16 GB RAM, SSD) and it does indeed shutter occasionally in animations - I assume it tries to upload some asset for the GPU and it misses the presentation time. The overall performance is actually pretty nice for such old hardware.
  - yxhuvud 4y ago
    I'm on wayland, using whichever version of gnome that come with ubuntu 22.10. Hardware is a 3950x with a radeon 5700xt. That should be more than plenty for being able to render firefox and a couple of electron apps (slack, discord) without stutter. Usually it works fine, but sometimes there is stutter or downright freezes. Note that it doesn't (currently) crash, the when a freeze happens it goes on for a while (30s?) and then go away.
    - pmontra 4y ago
      Your hw is beefier than mine. It could be Wayland (I'm on X11) but it shouldn't because it is designed not to stutter. It should definitely not freeze. Graphic card driver?
flas9sd 4y ago
while I don't mind on a desktop, if it's a not so recent smartphone and has 2G ram, memory usage matters. Gnome mobile and phosh are very good shells. Using the same gnome-settings on mobile is quite a feature, it being memory efficient makes for broader usage (in those devices)
twelvedogs 4y ago
Wouldn't high memory usage suggest it will need to bring more from dusk into memory not less
forgotmypw17 4y ago
For one thing, I would rather it be used for my applications, not the desktop environment. But the real reason I love XFCE is that RAM use is just a small part of the puzzle of overall weight and resource use, which correlates with performance and responsiveness. Another correlation, in my experience, is bugs and glitches. It makes sense to me, since more resource use means more code means more places for bugs to appear.
- peatmoss 4y ago
  > Another correlation, in my experience, is bugs and glitches. Most of us are slumming it with non-ECC memory I'd wager. In a very real sense, more memory usage corresponds to a larger target for a bit to get flipped by an stray cosmic particle collision. I think the real reason why XFCE feels so stable and reliable, is that it is old. Old software that doesn't undergo frequent revolutions has a longer time to catch bugs, and doesn't introduce them at the same pace.
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    I agree. It's part of why I like it, is that it's feature complete, and rarely changes without my explicit request, something I appreciate in a workstation. I recently saw an article about "maximum viable product" in software, and it really resonated with me.
FpUser 4y ago
>"but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used?" Yes, I would. By the application that does some actual work for me. Not by glorified task launcher.
brnt 4y ago
> I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments. It's also far less trivial than looking at top output: at minimum you'd want error bars; i.e. repeat the measurement a few times. At Phoronix KDEs project to reduce memory occupancy has been shown to pay off: in their numbers KDE competes not with Gnome, but with XFCE. If this benchmarks shows a totally different result, at least one of them have a problem.
- spookie 4y ago
  I daily drive KDE, only see RAM usage that high while a browser is opened. Completely different distro though, so idk how comparable it is. Also, it's running on a VM, and I assume under software rendering. It might not make a dent for others, but if you add fancy effects like KDE does, then I don't think this is a fair comparison.
  - brnt 4y ago
    There are more doubts I have with their methodology: "A VM will get a 16GB disk drive, [..] 128MB of VRAM". These seem byzantine and may trigger all sorts of behavior that isn't tested for or should be tested for. Also, memory consumption is measured with `free`, which is even more evidence that not just the DE is measured, but the entire system. They only test Fedora Spins, but that is no assurance the rest of the config is identical between them. Something about lies and statistics ;) If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then simply use the DEs of your choice for a while and see what's optimal for you. Don't do silly things like measure memory consumption with `free` on a VM once, and draw general conclusions.
type0 4y ago
> but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used? CPU cache is faster than RAM, the more of your OS you can fit there the better and it affects responsiveness.
ChrisRR 4y ago
Presumably because the desktop isn't what people are actually using their computers for, it's the applications on top of that. So if you're using all of your CPU/RAM on the desktop, there's less left over for the stuff you bought the computer for
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  CPU is what I'm more worried about because if my DE causes my fans to run like they are jet engines, something isn't right. With KDE plasma, I basically got rid of panel plugins simply because adding each to the panel caused the CPU usage to go even higher (and I wasn't running any other heavy apps). I wish KDE would stop running after features and dedicate a release or two to just performance optimization - it is already an excellent featureful DE.
rdsubhas 4y ago
It appears you did not read the article fully. They measure memory for the same reason, capacity: > Overall if you are a user of KDE and Gnome you must be looking at the very least 4GB of RAM though modern web browser eat RAM for breakfast so 6GB or even 8GB of RAM sound a lot more desirable.. Edit: On a general note, the summary of your comment is like "measuring memory is bad – unless it's for <<this objective>>". Even if it's for <<this objective>> it still has to be measured in the first place. There is no need to argue against measuring as it then becomes circularly invalid.
citrin_ru 4y ago
I'm typing this comment from a notebook with 8Gb RAM and it is barely enough for a modern desktop - my system is running out of RAM from time to time (because modern sites are JS heavy and Firefox with multiple tabs sometimes uses all available RAM). I use i3 which has a small memory footprint and assume that with KDE/Gnome I will be running out of RAM more often. If you have >32 Gb RAM you could ignore DE/WM memory usage but it is a relatively privileged position to be able upgrade hardware faster than software appetites rise.
- mmsimanga 4y ago
  This. Perhaps HN crowd can afford machines with sizeable amounts of RAM but many people in my family still use old hardware. 2G RAM machines are pretty common from Windows 7 era. I often "upgrade" family members unwilling to buy a new computer onto lightweight Linux distros which don't need that much RAM.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  I have brought a 8GB laptop (2 exclusive for the GPU) with the intent of upgrading the memory about an year ago. But I have been postponing it due to plain lack of need. The only times it has lacked memory were when GHC autoconfigured into using 2 threads for each CPU core and when I install some memory hungry add-ons on Kerbal Space Program. I never noticed the memory limit on normal usage.
- StillBored 4y ago
  This is inherent in GCed environments, and firefox/etc aren't tuned to enforce minimizing memory utilization because it saps perf. So, you end up having to do it yourself. Run a tab discard plugin, and then keep an about:memory window open and click the minimize memory utilization button on a regular basis (probably a plugin/etc to do that, but I just trigger it manually every once in a while). And that is on machines that have 32-64G of ram.
0dayz 4y ago
It was relevant back in the day when we still had that 1 application could take up to 40-50% of your RAM, and you barely had upgrade options.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Are most people having a web browser open 99% of the time? I know a lot of people who open many many tabs and I believe it can certainly take up to 40-50% of their ram or more, especiallly on 2/4GB machines that are still ubiquitous for people who do not buy a new machine every 3 years.
kstenerud 4y ago
I'd rather have the resources available for use in my applications, not being pointlessly chewed up by my desktop environment. That's why I always use the Mate desktop: Small footprint, and does everything a desktop environment should: manage your environment & apps, have clean UX, and otherwise get the hell out of your way.
rakoo 4y ago
The more interesting point of view is why buy new hardware, with higher specs, if the old one still works ? We only have enough resources to build new computers for the next 30 years, after that it's going to be impossible. We have millions of old machines lying around, maybe billions if you count smartphones. All unused. Why not use them instead of buying new ? We desperately need to aim for lower consumption if we want to use that. It's an environmental and a social imperative at this point.
- newswasboring 4y ago
  > We only have enough resources to build new computers for the next 30 years, after that it's going to be impossible. This is the first I am hearing about this. Source?
  - rakoo 4y ago
    I haven't found a holistic source in English, but you have to look at the reserves in things like zinc, antimony, and friends. Here's one for zinc: https://igeoguide.com/zinc-reserves-and-production-worldwide-igeoguide/ https://igeoguide.com/zinc-reserves-and-production-worldwide...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pxoe 4y ago
it is this kind of attitude, 'whatever, just let the system use it', that has led us to where 2 GB, and then 4 GB, and now 8 GB, all became 'no longer enough'. (and apparently, 16 GB is no longer "enough" either, as the apps or the entire system still can end up grinding to a halt or just crashing, even then.) lack of accountability, lack of control, developer carelessness, lead to memory usage and minimal/comfortable specs steadily increasing.
darthrupert 4y ago
Probably a remnant from a time when memory wasn't so dirt xheap as it is now. I still prefer to use i3 or sway but because they're simple in all the good ways.
throw827474737 4y ago
> If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? Fallacy already starts at this assumption? And then there is also the one more/bigger whatever I'd want to open and be happy when that is available right away.. memory efficiency also usually often correlates quite perfect with runtime and power efficiency and even responsiveness.. > but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used? Definitely no, wtf is that? :D At least not for the DE that should enable my work..
RunSet 4y ago
> would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? Are those the only two options? In any case the memory is technically "used" when dog slow trying to load UI components from disk. It is just not used until that happens. Reminds me of those applications from the dialup days that would "speed up your internet" by loading every link on a page in the background in case you click one of them. In practice they often slowed down your internet by misusing your bandwidth. Despite what you imply, and despite my own expectations, in actual usage I have observed that the greater the memory requirements of a desktop environment, the laggier it is likely to be in terms of responding to my input. Perhaps it is a mistake to assume that desktop environments' increased memory usage is devoted entirely to readying UI components that would otherwise be stored on disk.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used? Yes. But not by a desktop.
dusted 4y ago
I'd rather see it unused and not trying to load things from disk. Hundreds of megabytes of data in memory (or the need to reference this much) is a symptom that stuff's rotting.. The framebuffers should be the largest allocation required for a desktop environment.
topaz0 4y ago
Perhaps in the hypothetical scenario that I had the hardware I wouldn't care. But I don't have the hardware, and I do care. Separately, I'd think you'd want to weigh the memory usage against the utility of the features it enables. The memory is there so that it can be used, of course, but I have a certain memory budget, and I'd rather use that budget on things I care about. So now I can weigh this 1 GiB overhead of Gnome compared to something lightweight against the extra facilities the Gnome provides. I can't think of anything I miss in the lightweight option compared to Gnome, so I'll stick with my lightweight choices.
modshatereality 4y ago
if you don't care about drive wear, and have an OS that will swap unused bloat memory pages to disk, go for it.

scarygliders 4y ago

Some people can use some quite RAM-hungry applications, therefore the more RAM available to those the better.

onli 4y ago
Not some people - everyone uses a web browser.
- scarygliders 4y ago
  Indeed, that is included within the subset of "quite RAM-hungry applications" :)
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Since we read that, there is a high chance (not total)... This page weights in the staggering order of 16MB on Lynx!
zokier 4y ago
I'd imagine most people running RAM hungry applications would have enough RAM so that saving single gigabyte is not really relevant
- c-cube 4y ago
  I'm horrified by the words "saving a single gigabyte". What have we come to? Wasting a billion bytes is a small deal now? :-/
- scarygliders 4y ago
  Okay here's a typical example... Try running Stable-Diffusion, specifically the Automatic1111 version, and merging various checkpoints. On my 32GB PC, after doing a few merges, the linux kernel is beginning to use many GBs of swap. Further attempts at merging checkpoints can result in OOM kicking in. If I can save a GB or two, that can help get those final mergings accomplished. Otherwise, it's a case of restarting the application and continuing from there. An alternative is to keep increasing the available swap space. Mine is at 10GB by default. The problem with that is you can end up waiting for the system to swap stuff in and out, and this can result in system pauses. The other alternative of course is to buy more RAM. And here was me thinking 32GB was a decent amount ;)

sgsag33 4y ago

Err why should I want my UI eat up my RAM - it's a resource. I also don't buy this argument that its OK for modern OSes to eat up 3-4GB of RAM and that it doesn't matter and that it frees it if you need it...

sampo 4y ago

> If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? I am willing to bet, that while Xfce uses less memory than Gnome or KDE, Xfce is also more snappy. I bet smaller memory use and snappiness correlate, while your comment is suggesting an anti-correlation.

rockyj 4y ago
Yeah, but Xfce also has fewer features and less polish. e.g. I have had regular problems with connecting multiple monitors or from restarting a monitor etc. KDE also on the other hand has more useful applications pre-loaded (for minimalists it might be "bloat") but like others said, if you have the disk and memory why not get a more useable DE.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- collyw 4y ago
  Not used KDE for ages, but personally I find XFCE and Cinnamon more usable than the Gnome desktops. But then I am pretty old school.
reacharavindh 4y ago
Hmm. I can see how my argument came across as anti-correlation. But, my intent was to highlight how unreliable “memory used” is as a metric for how good&usable a desktop environment is. Not doubting whether xfce could be snappier than KDE while using less resources. It could also be doing far less right?
- fuzzy2 4y ago
  > But, my intent was to highlight how unreliable “memory used” is as a metric for how good&usable a desktop environment is. I don't think this is what TFA is about at all. It is merely comparing resource usage, I don't see it making any other statements. This is useful if you must decide what to use on a less powerful PC.

zozbot234 4y ago

If you have the hardware, your disk reads get cached anyway. It's almost never the case that RAM goes totally unused.

_8j50 4y ago

I have other applications that need the memory. Just open slack in one tab and it eats up 4gb. I need the DE to get out of the way as much as possible. I use lxqt which isn't very impressive but light enough. Awesomewm is really nice too for a tiling environment. The best lightweight was Enlightnment 17, I have no idea why they just dropped off the radar.

mikecoles 4y ago
I've long been a fan of Enlightenment. It's still going well. https://www.enlightenment.org/download https://www.enlightenment.org/download
UncleSlacky 4y ago
Bodhi's fork of E17 (Moksha) is still pretty popular. I think the Moksha dev team are of the opinion that Enlightenment's development post-17 has been a mistake. https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/ https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
somat 4y ago
Wasn't Enlightnment the opposite of a lightweight environment. That is, if I remember correctly it included every single visual gimmick, it's only saving grace was the it was coded fairly efficiently.

mesebrec 4y ago

I'm a CS teacher that asks their students to run multiple Linux instances in VMs. RAM usage is the biggest issue in this case. If each VM takes 1.5 GB just to open a terminal, running multiple on a laptop with only 8GB of ram becomes difficult. So I for one am very happy with these benchmarks.

pca006132 4y ago
Why not ask them to run headless VMs? they can even ssh into remotw instances so they don't even have to download and setup the VMs manually!
- nix23 4y ago
  Yeah or just make a account on sdf.org. And why more then one GUI-linux-vm?...i personally would just connect (ssh or mosh) to sdf (NetBSD) for C, sh, python etc on sdf.org. BSD's and linux are 90% the same and the rest is not hard to learn. >INSTRUCTOR (free) >STUDENT (free) https://sdf.org/?join https://sdf.org/?join
  - anthk 4y ago
    You are at sdf? Cool :) I have an account, but I am not validated yet. On VM resources... FFS, Alpine could run under 128MB of RAM, enough to do basic configurations.
    - nix23 4y ago
      >You are at sdf? Yes ;) for netbsd and plan9/9front (9p.sdf.org) Got my account ~3 years ago an validated it immediately, it's fast and simple (at least with paypal). For plan9 you don't need validation just create a new account (same mail-adress if you will and different pw) https://sdf.org/plan9/ https://sdf.org/plan9/ >On VM resources... FFS, Alpine could run under 128MB of RAM, enough to do basic configurations. Yeah Alpine is really nice...and musl ;)
  - wink 4y ago
    Interesting how you'd infer that a simple user shell (remote) would tick all the boxes I'd associate with running a VM. Root access, networking (between the VMs), works offline, can (doesn't have to) use GUI programs.

thayne 4y ago

It depends on how you are using your desktop. More memory used for the DE means less memory for other stuff, like running VMs or development servers, compiling and dev tools, games or media applications, a browser, and even just caching disk files in memory.

LoganDark 4y ago

GNOME 43 on my Fedora Silverblue 37 (and presumably all other installations?) takes 6 GiB of RAM at minimum. It's sort of sad. Also I run it from a flash drive.

pjmlp 4y ago
When they decided to reboot their extensions in JS, that pretty much done it for me.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  It's annoying that extensions like Blur My Shell can't fix the critical issues with the blurring because they're written in high-level JavaScript and can only use the bindings that GTK gives them. So I'll have to deal without application blur, but at least the fact that I can blur some things (like the overview) is really nice.
vetinari 4y ago
Not really; Fedora 37 with GNOME 43 inside a VM with 4 GB/no swap uses 1.9 GB RAM for a fully running desktop.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  Ugh, it appears that I misremembered. GNOME takes about 113MB of real memory, and 6GB of virtual. Still extremely scary for systems without overcommit enabled, but with overcommit, not terrible.

senko 4y ago

> I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments.. If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? Linux already uses all the availabe RAM for disk cache. I would rather not an app do that (except in special cases like databases, which know better than the underlying file system what needs to be cached). If a desktop environment is using a lot of memory, this means the same memory is not available to my other apps. So yeah, even on a 32GB machine, I do care about what each app uses. As I type this, on my 32GB GNOME system, 21GB is currently in use. Of those gnome-shell uses 2,1GB + another 700MB for gjs and zoom (which I haven't used for a couple days, it just sits in my tray) uses 1,4GB. That's 12% for doing virtually nothing (there are window managers that easily take 5% of the resources of gnome shell and one of these days I'll be fed up enough to switch; and zoom does literally nothing right now except hog memory), and that's just looking at the two top memory users.

eptcyka 4y ago
Whilst some components inherently use more memory than other viable alternatives (gnome-shell's JS runtime), gnome-shell generally has a lot more components and thus features than the more barebones window managers - and this should always be pointed out. Of course, if you are certain you will never need the extra functionality, then don't use Gnome. But generally, I don't think it makes sense to compare plain window managers with desktop environments. I think an interesting comparison would also be looking at quartz, the macOS window manager/desktop environment.
- senko 4y ago
  You can use Gnome with other window managers. I was talking specifically about gnome-shell.
- dman 4y ago
  xfce isnt just a window manager.
- inetknght 4y ago
  > gnome-shell generally has a lot more components and thus features than the more barebones window managers My experience with gnome-shell is that it is in fact a huge massive bloat for what it provides. What features does it provide that more barebones window managers don't provide?

atoav 4y ago

Depends on your application tho. On a Raspberry Pi that is a server and has a GUI only for occasional use these metrics might be more crucial. If you have a high powered laptop that you just use for browsing, you might not care so much about anything at all.

_trampeltier 4y ago
This. Or if you use for something an old laptop, there may be better options than KDE. But that's the cool thing with Linux Windows Manager. It's your choice.

KingLancelot 4y ago

yxhuvud 4y ago

I'd be a lot more interested in CPU usage, gnome is pretty terrible there and tend to either stutter, or worse - freeze for a while, quite often. It be interesting to see if the alternatives are as bad.

pmontra 4y ago
Which GNOME are you using and on which hardware? I don't remember those problems with my old laptop from 2006 and with the one I'm currently using from 2014. Crashes happens, maybe not every year. I'm working with an Intel i7 4xxx, 32 GB RAM, SSD, GNOME shell 3.36, Ubuntu 20.04, NVIDIA Quadro K1100M. However I might have skipped some problems because I've been on GNOME Flashback for a while, from 2014 to 2020, while I waited for enough extensions to appear to recreated the saner (for me) environment before GNOME 3.
- vetinari 4y ago
  I have an older Ivy-bridge laptop from 2012 (Thinkpad T430s, 16 GB RAM, SSD) and it does indeed shutter occasionally in animations - I assume it tries to upload some asset for the GPU and it misses the presentation time. The overall performance is actually pretty nice for such old hardware.
- yxhuvud 4y ago
  I'm on wayland, using whichever version of gnome that come with ubuntu 22.10. Hardware is a 3950x with a radeon 5700xt. That should be more than plenty for being able to render firefox and a couple of electron apps (slack, discord) without stutter. Usually it works fine, but sometimes there is stutter or downright freezes. Note that it doesn't (currently) crash, the when a freeze happens it goes on for a while (30s?) and then go away.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    Your hw is beefier than mine. It could be Wayland (I'm on X11) but it shouldn't because it is designed not to stutter. It should definitely not freeze. Graphic card driver?

flas9sd 4y ago

while I don't mind on a desktop, if it's a not so recent smartphone and has 2G ram, memory usage matters. Gnome mobile and phosh are very good shells. Using the same gnome-settings on mobile is quite a feature, it being memory efficient makes for broader usage (in those devices)

twelvedogs 4y ago

Wouldn't high memory usage suggest it will need to bring more from dusk into memory not less

forgotmypw17 4y ago

For one thing, I would rather it be used for my applications, not the desktop environment. But the real reason I love XFCE is that RAM use is just a small part of the puzzle of overall weight and resource use, which correlates with performance and responsiveness. Another correlation, in my experience, is bugs and glitches. It makes sense to me, since more resource use means more code means more places for bugs to appear.

peatmoss 4y ago
> Another correlation, in my experience, is bugs and glitches. Most of us are slumming it with non-ECC memory I'd wager. In a very real sense, more memory usage corresponds to a larger target for a bit to get flipped by an stray cosmic particle collision. I think the real reason why XFCE feels so stable and reliable, is that it is old. Old software that doesn't undergo frequent revolutions has a longer time to catch bugs, and doesn't introduce them at the same pace.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  I agree. It's part of why I like it, is that it's feature complete, and rarely changes without my explicit request, something I appreciate in a workstation. I recently saw an article about "maximum viable product" in software, and it really resonated with me.

FpUser 4y ago

>"but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used?" Yes, I would. By the application that does some actual work for me. Not by glorified task launcher.

brnt 4y ago

> I’ll never understand the logic behind “high memory usage” as a metric for desktop environments. It's also far less trivial than looking at top output: at minimum you'd want error bars; i.e. repeat the measurement a few times. At Phoronix KDEs project to reduce memory occupancy has been shown to pay off: in their numbers KDE competes not with Gnome, but with XFCE. If this benchmarks shows a totally different result, at least one of them have a problem.

spookie 4y ago
I daily drive KDE, only see RAM usage that high while a browser is opened. Completely different distro though, so idk how comparable it is. Also, it's running on a VM, and I assume under software rendering. It might not make a dent for others, but if you add fancy effects like KDE does, then I don't think this is a fair comparison.
- brnt 4y ago
  There are more doubts I have with their methodology: "A VM will get a 16GB disk drive, [..] 128MB of VRAM". These seem byzantine and may trigger all sorts of behavior that isn't tested for or should be tested for. Also, memory consumption is measured with `free`, which is even more evidence that not just the DE is measured, but the entire system. They only test Fedora Spins, but that is no assurance the rest of the config is identical between them. Something about lies and statistics ;) If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then simply use the DEs of your choice for a while and see what's optimal for you. Don't do silly things like measure memory consumption with `free` on a VM once, and draw general conclusions.

type0 4y ago

> but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used? CPU cache is faster than RAM, the more of your OS you can fit there the better and it affects responsiveness.

ChrisRR 4y ago

Presumably because the desktop isn't what people are actually using their computers for, it's the applications on top of that. So if you're using all of your CPU/RAM on the desktop, there's less left over for the stuff you bought the computer for

noisy_boy 4y ago
CPU is what I'm more worried about because if my DE causes my fans to run like they are jet engines, something isn't right. With KDE plasma, I basically got rid of panel plugins simply because adding each to the panel caused the CPU usage to go even higher (and I wasn't running any other heavy apps). I wish KDE would stop running after features and dedicate a release or two to just performance optimization - it is already an excellent featureful DE.

rdsubhas 4y ago

It appears you did not read the article fully. They measure memory for the same reason, capacity: > Overall if you are a user of KDE and Gnome you must be looking at the very least 4GB of RAM though modern web browser eat RAM for breakfast so 6GB or even 8GB of RAM sound a lot more desirable.. Edit: On a general note, the summary of your comment is like "measuring memory is bad – unless it's for <<this objective>>". Even if it's for <<this objective>> it still has to be measured in the first place. There is no need to argue against measuring as it then becomes circularly invalid.

citrin_ru 4y ago

I'm typing this comment from a notebook with 8Gb RAM and it is barely enough for a modern desktop - my system is running out of RAM from time to time (because modern sites are JS heavy and Firefox with multiple tabs sometimes uses all available RAM). I use i3 which has a small memory footprint and assume that with KDE/Gnome I will be running out of RAM more often. If you have >32 Gb RAM you could ignore DE/WM memory usage but it is a relatively privileged position to be able upgrade hardware faster than software appetites rise.

mmsimanga 4y ago
This. Perhaps HN crowd can afford machines with sizeable amounts of RAM but many people in my family still use old hardware. 2G RAM machines are pretty common from Windows 7 era. I often "upgrade" family members unwilling to buy a new computer onto lightweight Linux distros which don't need that much RAM.
marcosdumay 4y ago
I have brought a 8GB laptop (2 exclusive for the GPU) with the intent of upgrading the memory about an year ago. But I have been postponing it due to plain lack of need. The only times it has lacked memory were when GHC autoconfigured into using 2 threads for each CPU core and when I install some memory hungry add-ons on Kerbal Space Program. I never noticed the memory limit on normal usage.
StillBored 4y ago
This is inherent in GCed environments, and firefox/etc aren't tuned to enforce minimizing memory utilization because it saps perf. So, you end up having to do it yourself. Run a tab discard plugin, and then keep an about:memory window open and click the minimize memory utilization button on a regular basis (probably a plugin/etc to do that, but I just trigger it manually every once in a while). And that is on machines that have 32-64G of ram.

0dayz 4y ago

It was relevant back in the day when we still had that 1 application could take up to 40-50% of your RAM, and you barely had upgrade options.

prmoustache 4y ago
Are most people having a web browser open 99% of the time? I know a lot of people who open many many tabs and I believe it can certainly take up to 40-50% of their ram or more, especiallly on 2/4GB machines that are still ubiquitous for people who do not buy a new machine every 3 years.

kstenerud 4y ago

I'd rather have the resources available for use in my applications, not being pointlessly chewed up by my desktop environment. That's why I always use the Mate desktop: Small footprint, and does everything a desktop environment should: manage your environment & apps, have clean UX, and otherwise get the hell out of your way.

rakoo 4y ago

The more interesting point of view is why buy new hardware, with higher specs, if the old one still works ? We only have enough resources to build new computers for the next 30 years, after that it's going to be impossible. We have millions of old machines lying around, maybe billions if you count smartphones. All unused. Why not use them instead of buying new ? We desperately need to aim for lower consumption if we want to use that. It's an environmental and a social imperative at this point.

newswasboring 4y ago
> We only have enough resources to build new computers for the next 30 years, after that it's going to be impossible. This is the first I am hearing about this. Source?
- rakoo 4y ago
  I haven't found a holistic source in English, but you have to look at the reserves in things like zinc, antimony, and friends. Here's one for zinc: https://igeoguide.com/zinc-reserves-and-production-worldwide-igeoguide/ https://igeoguide.com/zinc-reserves-and-production-worldwide...

deleted 4y ago

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pxoe 4y ago

it is this kind of attitude, 'whatever, just let the system use it', that has led us to where 2 GB, and then 4 GB, and now 8 GB, all became 'no longer enough'. (and apparently, 16 GB is no longer "enough" either, as the apps or the entire system still can end up grinding to a halt or just crashing, even then.) lack of accountability, lack of control, developer carelessness, lead to memory usage and minimal/comfortable specs steadily increasing.

darthrupert 4y ago

Probably a remnant from a time when memory wasn't so dirt xheap as it is now. I still prefer to use i3 or sway but because they're simple in all the good ways.

throw827474737 4y ago

> If you had the hardware, would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? Fallacy already starts at this assumption? And then there is also the one more/bigger whatever I'd want to open and be happy when that is available right away.. memory efficiency also usually often correlates quite perfect with runtime and power efficiency and even responsiveness.. > but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used? Definitely no, wtf is that? :D At least not for the DE that should enable my work..

RunSet 4y ago

> would you rather see it used or see it dog slow trying to load UI components from disk? Are those the only two options? In any case the memory is technically "used" when dog slow trying to load UI components from disk. It is just not used until that happens. Reminds me of those applications from the dialup days that would "speed up your internet" by loading every link on a page in the background in case you click one of them. In practice they often slowed down your internet by misusing your bandwidth. Despite what you imply, and despite my own expectations, in actual usage I have observed that the greater the memory requirements of a desktop environment, the laggier it is likely to be in terms of responding to my input. Perhaps it is a mistake to assume that desktop environments' increased memory usage is devoted entirely to readying UI components that would otherwise be stored on disk.

nonethewiser 4y ago

> but on a machine with 8 GiB of RAM, would you not rather see it being used? Yes. But not by a desktop.

dusted 4y ago

I'd rather see it unused and not trying to load things from disk. Hundreds of megabytes of data in memory (or the need to reference this much) is a symptom that stuff's rotting.. The framebuffers should be the largest allocation required for a desktop environment.

topaz0 4y ago

Perhaps in the hypothetical scenario that I had the hardware I wouldn't care. But I don't have the hardware, and I do care. Separately, I'd think you'd want to weigh the memory usage against the utility of the features it enables. The memory is there so that it can be used, of course, but I have a certain memory budget, and I'd rather use that budget on things I care about. So now I can weigh this 1 GiB overhead of Gnome compared to something lightweight against the extra facilities the Gnome provides. I can't think of anything I miss in the lightweight option compared to Gnome, so I'll stick with my lightweight choices.

modshatereality 4y ago

if you don't care about drive wear, and have an OS that will swap unused bloat memory pages to disk, go for it.