5 ms·

> 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 le

by 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.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>I bet smaller memory use and snappiness correlate You bet, but do you have any experience of any kind to back this up or is it just a vague hunch? In my anecdotal experience, the snappiness of a DE is given almost exclusively by the compositor and amount of CPU cycles and disk I/O ops used by the DE, and less about the RAM used. Of major importance is the input lag of the compositor, with Wayland feeling far more snappier than X11 in most cases. So I wish more of these tests would investigate CPU usage and disk I/O, rather than these RAM tests where users come to the premature "oh look, DE_1 at idle uses 200MB less RAM than DE_2, so it must be faster" conclusion, which couldn't be more false in the real world usage scenarios of how human users perceive snappiness. There's much more to this than just idle RAM usage. So to contradict you, no, idle RAM usage does not in any way always directly correlate to perceived DE snappiness.
- Lutger 4y ago
  Why not try to measure snappiness directly? There's tons of research about this in UX land, which is not my field but I'm aware of it, defining precisely which kind of interactions at what latencies feel instantaneous and so an and so forth. There is a lot of focus on measuring the system in linux land (cpu, memory, io, etc) from the perspective of a user (and by users), but its actually often the least informative. Developers and operators often benefit more from this level of measurement. I suspect this is because its much easier to measure system utilization in a standardized way. Maybe this is a nice project to develop user friendly and standardized application level benchmarking for linux desktop (these are more readily available in web development).
mesebrec 4y ago
I run both XFCE and Gnome, and XFCE is much snappier. Gnome does a lot more, and is a lot easier to extend given the JS support, but that has an impact on resource usage.
bayindirh 4y ago
XFCE is a pretty snappy desktop interface, sure, however KDE is not less snappy than XFCE. I have used both more than >5 years, at the same time. KDE was on a much slower system and was not visibly slow w.r.t. XFCE. Now I'm using KDE everywhere. The perceived slowness is due to window effects in KDE. Disable these and window appear before you lift your finger from your mouse or enter key. Lastly, KDE's memory usage comes from the facilities it provides. Disable them if you don't need them, and save a lot of memory. KWin (window manager + compositor) uses ~180MB on a 4K screen, while file manager needs another 57. That's not much.
- nyanpasu64 4y ago
  plasmashell, which is written in QML (JS-based), uses hundreds of megabytes, and sometimes leaks memory or bugs out (as far as I can tell, the leaking and instability/crashing is an interaction between QML/JS, the JS engine, and KDE's C++ classes exposed to JS through bindings).
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    After a week of uptime, plasmashell is consuming 350MB memory (taken just now from my process manager). Considering this is my work machine and I never reboot except kernel updates, I've never seen it leak memory or crash tho. This is Debian Testing with KDE 5.26.4 w/ Frameworks 5.100 w/ Qt 5.15. 350MB is not very optimal of course. I may dig the code to see the reasons, tho. XFCE4 had a similar memory leak ~2 years ago, which was triggered every time screen went into sleep and came back. So, bugs & shenanigans happens, but I'm not still sure that KDE is "hell of a bloat" considering the things it provides at the speed it provides.
    - nyanpasu64 4y ago
      Checking coredumpctl, I've gotten two plasmashell segfaults in the past 4 months, and recall hangs and crashes happening more often in the past (especially under NVIDIA drivers). Additionally plasmashell has hung a few times and/or kwin terminated unexpectedly, though I think this is a Mesa bug (https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/zbux1i/where_would_i_start_looking_to_debug_random_kwin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/zbux1i/where_would_i_s..., https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/7674 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/7674) or amdgpu kernel bug (I've had multiple GPU driver hangs and unusable screens on sleep-wake, usually preceded by kwin dying in the same session).
Lutger 4y ago
The fact that you need to bet is exactly the problem, even when you are right. The article does 'blind monitoring of memory usage', which the comment you respond to points out suggest to the problematic, but in fact could also be benign and even beneficial. So consider you are right and memory usage after boot correlates to being less snappy. That might be just a coincidence, with N being so small, and not a cause. Or maybe there is an interesting, unmentioned cause for both. Or maybe the higher memory usage is due to features that most users actually want, for example better file indexing for search or whatever. It is not surprising to me that offering less features result in faster systems. In this case the comparison doesn't really make sense. But it would also not surprise me if a system that uses a lot of memory is faster, if it uses that memory for caching for example. So we don't know what 'free memory after boot' is a signal of and we don't really know if that is even important. Maybe it is to some who have 4gb or less memory. I have 64gb in my laptop, why should I care? (honest question, I can think of reasons). If you are going to measure a signal, it is only going to be useful if you have a sound story about what the signal represents and why we should care about it. Otherwise its just a blind ranking game, kind of an e-sports competition, which will perversely incentivize useless investments (of time) and choices.
signa11 4y ago
'... I bet smaller memory use and snappiness correlate ...' one way to probably look at this is as follows: optimising on memory usage f.e. by packing/encoding more information in a limited space, results in reduction of running time of programs. this is because, you reduce the amount of 'stuff' that needs to be moved around in memory (and programs are always doing that).
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
That used to be true, but since KDE4 hit the scene, KDE is typically just as snappy. That's probably not true for low low memory situations, but in general that's been my experience. And my primary desktop is i3, if that tells you anything. OTOH, even when running KDE I tend to use small tools such as leafpad, konsole, vim, etc.

by sampo 4y ago

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.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>I bet smaller memory use and snappiness correlate You bet, but do you have any experience of any kind to back this up or is it just a vague hunch? In my anecdotal experience, the snappiness of a DE is given almost exclusively by the compositor and amount of CPU cycles and disk I/O ops used by the DE, and less about the RAM used. Of major importance is the input lag of the compositor, with Wayland feeling far more snappier than X11 in most cases. So I wish more of these tests would investigate CPU usage and disk I/O, rather than these RAM tests where users come to the premature "oh look, DE_1 at idle uses 200MB less RAM than DE_2, so it must be faster" conclusion, which couldn't be more false in the real world usage scenarios of how human users perceive snappiness. There's much more to this than just idle RAM usage. So to contradict you, no, idle RAM usage does not in any way always directly correlate to perceived DE snappiness.

Lutger 4y ago
Why not try to measure snappiness directly? There's tons of research about this in UX land, which is not my field but I'm aware of it, defining precisely which kind of interactions at what latencies feel instantaneous and so an and so forth. There is a lot of focus on measuring the system in linux land (cpu, memory, io, etc) from the perspective of a user (and by users), but its actually often the least informative. Developers and operators often benefit more from this level of measurement. I suspect this is because its much easier to measure system utilization in a standardized way. Maybe this is a nice project to develop user friendly and standardized application level benchmarking for linux desktop (these are more readily available in web development).

mesebrec 4y ago

I run both XFCE and Gnome, and XFCE is much snappier. Gnome does a lot more, and is a lot easier to extend given the JS support, but that has an impact on resource usage.

bayindirh 4y ago

XFCE is a pretty snappy desktop interface, sure, however KDE is not less snappy than XFCE. I have used both more than >5 years, at the same time. KDE was on a much slower system and was not visibly slow w.r.t. XFCE. Now I'm using KDE everywhere. The perceived slowness is due to window effects in KDE. Disable these and window appear before you lift your finger from your mouse or enter key. Lastly, KDE's memory usage comes from the facilities it provides. Disable them if you don't need them, and save a lot of memory. KWin (window manager + compositor) uses ~180MB on a 4K screen, while file manager needs another 57. That's not much.

nyanpasu64 4y ago
plasmashell, which is written in QML (JS-based), uses hundreds of megabytes, and sometimes leaks memory or bugs out (as far as I can tell, the leaking and instability/crashing is an interaction between QML/JS, the JS engine, and KDE's C++ classes exposed to JS through bindings).
- bayindirh 4y ago
  After a week of uptime, plasmashell is consuming 350MB memory (taken just now from my process manager). Considering this is my work machine and I never reboot except kernel updates, I've never seen it leak memory or crash tho. This is Debian Testing with KDE 5.26.4 w/ Frameworks 5.100 w/ Qt 5.15. 350MB is not very optimal of course. I may dig the code to see the reasons, tho. XFCE4 had a similar memory leak ~2 years ago, which was triggered every time screen went into sleep and came back. So, bugs & shenanigans happens, but I'm not still sure that KDE is "hell of a bloat" considering the things it provides at the speed it provides.
  - nyanpasu64 4y ago
    Checking coredumpctl, I've gotten two plasmashell segfaults in the past 4 months, and recall hangs and crashes happening more often in the past (especially under NVIDIA drivers). Additionally plasmashell has hung a few times and/or kwin terminated unexpectedly, though I think this is a Mesa bug (https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/zbux1i/where_would_i_start_looking_to_debug_random_kwin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/zbux1i/where_would_i_s..., https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/7674 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/7674) or amdgpu kernel bug (I've had multiple GPU driver hangs and unusable screens on sleep-wake, usually preceded by kwin dying in the same session).

Lutger 4y ago

The fact that you need to bet is exactly the problem, even when you are right. The article does 'blind monitoring of memory usage', which the comment you respond to points out suggest to the problematic, but in fact could also be benign and even beneficial. So consider you are right and memory usage after boot correlates to being less snappy. That might be just a coincidence, with N being so small, and not a cause. Or maybe there is an interesting, unmentioned cause for both. Or maybe the higher memory usage is due to features that most users actually want, for example better file indexing for search or whatever. It is not surprising to me that offering less features result in faster systems. In this case the comparison doesn't really make sense. But it would also not surprise me if a system that uses a lot of memory is faster, if it uses that memory for caching for example. So we don't know what 'free memory after boot' is a signal of and we don't really know if that is even important. Maybe it is to some who have 4gb or less memory. I have 64gb in my laptop, why should I care? (honest question, I can think of reasons). If you are going to measure a signal, it is only going to be useful if you have a sound story about what the signal represents and why we should care about it. Otherwise its just a blind ranking game, kind of an e-sports competition, which will perversely incentivize useless investments (of time) and choices.

signa11 4y ago

'... I bet smaller memory use and snappiness correlate ...' one way to probably look at this is as follows: optimising on memory usage f.e. by packing/encoding more information in a limited space, results in reduction of running time of programs. this is because, you reduce the amount of 'stuff' that needs to be moved around in memory (and programs are always doing that).

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

That used to be true, but since KDE4 hit the scene, KDE is typically just as snappy. That's probably not true for low low memory situations, but in general that's been my experience. And my primary desktop is i3, if that tells you anything. OTOH, even when running KDE I tend to use small tools such as leafpad, konsole, vim, etc.