I have recently used KDE Neon, which is a distribution sitting on top of Ubuntu (like Kubuntu) but aligns and focuses its releases and development with KDE releases and updates. I was pleasantly surprised that while not doing much other than a couple of programs, the system was only using 700MB of RAM. I saw the CPU usage to be bumped up, though, which I guess is the trade-off.
In the comments of an article about KDE Plasma, somebody mentioned that his KDE system running Arch consumed only 500MB of RAM.
This got me thinking, if the underlying distribution has a larger impact on the resources than I thought.
If so, I wonder how much resources does an idling KDE install of openSUSE Tumbleweed typically run?
In comparison, I find Gnome shell (and Unity) to take 1.2 to 1.5 GB of RAM easily. Which is why I found Xfce more comfortable to use.
My system is Dual-core w/4GB of RAM so it isn’t a powerhouse and because of that, small bumps in performance can have a noticeable effect.
I’m just curious what your experiences are. Thanks.
Generally speaking,
The reason why KDE (and Gnome) use so many resources is because by default so many “bells and whistles” are turned on.
If you disable graphic bling and unnecessary automated resources, you’ll probably also be able to decrease the amount used.
But,
As you’ve discovered, it can make more sense to start minimal and add what you want instead of starting with everything turned on and figuring out how to turn things off.
Yeah, I know there can be a lot of things that can be running in the background. I am more curious if openSISE Tumbleweed was running similar to me neon & the Arch versions or if they are exceptions to the rule.
I run oS Tumbleweed on a 13 years old laptop with a single core 32 bit processor (Pentium M 760) and 2GB RAM.
In a Plasma5 session with only a few “konsole” windows open the cpu is 95% idle and “free” tells me:
hendrik@schlepptop:~> free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 2061940 336940 677612 7016 1047388 1477292
Swap: 2097148 0 2097148
TW is a “Development” version of openSUSE which will get new versions of everything as soon as they are deemed stable but with limited testing. For this reason, TW can behave differently at times compared to supported “Stable” versions of openSUSE, currently LEAP 42.2 and 42.1. But, whatever the individual apps/components they can be modified the “openSUSE way” consistently across all openSUSE versions. Obvious examples of this are the openSUSE branded Firefox, and the enhanced terminal consoles.
Broadly speaking,
Desktops will have the same “feel” across all currently supported versions but because of the underlying differences will at times behave differently. So, if you’re comparing to other distros, you will notice that all openSUSE installs with the same Desktop will share a similar “feel” compared to the same Desktop running on another distro.
Hi
I haven’t seen a great use of ram on my GNOME only installs, my Tumbleweed install (MacBook 4GB ram) doesn’t get much use firefox, fritzing mainly and accessed via synergy uses about 820MB idle…
This system I’m on (HP 255 G4 8GB ram) mainly OBS stuff, hexchat, mail, firefox (some steam and minecraft) currently using 2.5GB of ram (up almost 17 days), other system is running SLED 12 SP3 Beta on a HP TS 10 with only 2GB of ram is using 1.2GB.
My multiboot system doesn’t get used much (DELL Inspiron 5555 8GB ram) these days, more turn it on to update etc…
None of them have used swap yet… but that’s turned right down.
