A Memory Comparison of Light Linux Desktops – Part 2

Can be found in this image here:

http://l3net.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/cmp-all1.png?w=625&...

If I said I was surprised by KDE being the fattest I'd be lieing...

~Jeff

Sure Jeff - but I still prefer KDE over all others.

Look at how much fatter E17 is compared to dwm, that just seems needlessly excessive.

@Slacker_Mike E17 is the lightest of the full desktops though. Everything lighter than it are simply Window Managers.

~Jeff

The only real surprise is that LXDE is almost as low in memory usage as E17. But I expect the figures for XFCE are with either the gnome or KDE services turned on.

The LXDE stat doesn't really surprise me, it always performs about on par with E17 from my experience.

~Jeff

It's really not too surprising that I have found XFCE to be about as heavy a desktop as I can stand to use. I haven't tried Razor-qt, though, so it's possible I could put up with it. I have used E17 a bit, and it's workable. I don't mind LXDE, but I always feel like there's not much reason to use it over some of the window managers in combination with a couple of selected apps, and I really dislike not having the normal Openbox right-click menu even though I know that Openbox is running.

When I feel like something lighter weight, I find Fluxbox to be one of the best full desktop environment replacement window managers. With the system tray and the slit available, I can add just about any functionality I want. I also really like IceWM and Openbox (and Openbox is easy to augment). Blackbox isn't bad either, but I find myself missing some things from Fluxbox when I use it. I've also used Window Maker a bit, and it's not bad.

I've been meaning to give JWM more of a try, but I've generally only used it in Puppy, and I don't know how that reflects on a default install. I have also been meaning to really test out Awesome, but I haven't gotten around to doing so.

I was unfamiliar with i3. After reading a bit about it on its website, I am a bit intrigued. I might check that out soon.

I would like it if they'd include TDE, just to see what has happened to KDE over the years.

I'm surprised at the difference between FVWM and IceWM -- I thought they were essentially the same -- they were certainly very similar a decade or so ago, when I first used them on Debian Potato (in fact, I even thought Icewm was just a tweaked version of FVWM),

PekWM is another that should be near the top of that graph, meaning very low resource consumption. I'd love to see where fltk-based EDE would fit in.