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Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from August 2012. The article has been slightly improved.
This is part 1 of my desktop testing series. We'll deal with the 3 modern GTK+-based desktop environments in this entry.
I'm just going to fire up the desktop to see how many RAM is used at that time. No windows opened, no menu clicked. That means the value is the amount of RAM that the system has allocated on a 1 GB RAM virtual machine. When actually using the desktop, the needed amount of RAM will of course increase, often multiply.
I'll also tell you the amount of space the DE takes up on the hard disk and, just for fun, test what the minimal amount of RAM is that the DE really needs just to start up. This value is not of much use actually, since the system will then relay heavily on swapping and even just starting the DE may literally take several minutes. Of course productive working is absolutely impossible under such circumstances.
I'm using a virtualbox VM that I'm cloning for each of the desktop tests so every one has the same base on which to build up.
Our basic test system is a clean Arch installation with only "basic" pacstrapped onto the new partition. No development tools are needed since I build my binary packages on another virtual machine if anything is not available from the official repos.
Memory usage right after booting up (with a second login on tty2) and used disk space after removing pacman cache. Here are the values I got with _cat /proc/meminfo_ and _df_ respectively _df -h_:
Arch Linux 08/11 2012 MemTotal: 1030652 KB MemFree: 992524 KB Buffers: 5500 KB Cached: 14988 KB [Rootfs: 654288 / 639 MB] [RAM used at startup: 38128 / ~37 MB] (Absolute RAM minimum to still boot: 27 MB)
The GNOME 3 Shell is the default interface of GNOME 3. It works entirely different from the old GNOME 2, bringing in what they call "a new desktop metaphor". The old panel is gone and instead GNOME 3 offers "activities". While some people like the approach, there are a many former GNOME 2 users who state that they can't work with a desktop like this. 3D graphics acceleration is mandatory for the shell; on systems without it, a fallback mode is provided.
The GNOME 3 Shell desktop (PNG)
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit dbus virtualbox-archlinux-additions gnome
Memory usage right after starting up GNOME 3 Shell (with a second login on tty2) and used disk space after removing pacman cache. Here are the values I got with _cat /proc/meminfo_ and _df_ respectively _df -h_:
Arch Linux + GNOME 3 (3.4.2) MemTotal: 1030652 KB MemFree: 773200 KB Buffers: 14888 KB Cached: 114584 KB Rootfs: 1732056 / 1.7 GB [RAM used at startup: 257452 / ~251 MB] [Disk space (without base OS): 1077768 / 1.1 GB] (Absolute RAM minimum to still start up: 81 MB)
Cinnamon is an alternative UI for GNOME 3. It was born when the developers of Linux Mint realized that GNOME was not going into the direction that they had in mind for their distribution. They started a project called "Mint Gnome Shell Extension" but soon realized that this also did not give them enough control of how things developed. Eventually they decided to fork the GNOME Shell and this was the beginning of Cinnamon. It aims towards retaining a more classical desktop metaphor.
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit dbus virtualbox-archlinux-additions
pacman -U gnome-menus2-3.0.1-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U muffin-wm-1.0.6-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U cinnamon-1.5.2-2-i686.pkg.tar.xz
Memory usage right after starting up GNOME 3 Cinnamon UI (with a second login on tty2) and used disk space after removing pacman cache. Here are the values I got with _cat /proc/meminfo_ and _df_ respectively _df -h_:
Arch Linux + Cinnamon (1.5.2) MemTotal: 1030652 KB MemFree: 781996 KB Buffers: 14936 KB Cached: 107280 KB Rootfs: 1620556 / 1.6 GB [RAM used at startup: 248656 / ~243 MB] [Disk space (without base OS): 966268 / 1 GB] (Absolute RAM minimum to still start up: 72 MB)
Unity is another alternative UI based on GNOME 3. It's developed by Canonical, the company that is famous (or infamous, depending on whom you ask) for Ubuntu Linux. It's "going new ways" - and that shows. For fans of the classical desktop this one is a total mess whereas other people prefer to call it inovative. Anyways it's the default desktop of Ubuntu and since that is without any doubt a big distribution, it has a solid user base despite all objections towards it. It uses the rather uncommon nux toolkit. Unity is basically a Compiz-plugin and thus needs 3D graphics acceleration. A Unity2D variant (build upon Qt) also exists.
Unity is currently incompatible with glew1.8. Also I had to install the whole unity repo because just installing the basic unity package and its dependencies does not give me the full system (e.g. no menu to shut down in the upper right corner etc.). So it's necessary to forbid updating of glew1.7 before proceeding.
pacman -U freetype2-ubuntu-2.4.10-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U fontconfig-ubuntu-2.8.0-10-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U libxft-ubuntu-2.3.1-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U glew1.7-1.7.0-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit dbus virtualbox-archlinux-additions
Add additional repository "unity": http://unity.xe-xe.org/$arch
Accept to uninstall and replace several conflicting packages in next step:
pacman -S $(pacman -Slq unity)
Memory usage right after starting up GNOME 3 Unity UI (with a second login on tty2) and used disk space after removing pacman cache. Here are the values I got with _cat /proc/meminfo_ and _df_ respectively _df -h_:
Arch Linux + Unity (6.0.0) MemTotal: 1030652 KB MemFree: 637268 KB Buffers: 26052 KB Cached: 148020 KB Rootfs: 2862336 / 2.8 GB [RAM used at startup: 393384 / ~384 MB] [Disk space (without base OS): 2208048 / 2,15 GB] (Absolute RAM minimum to still start up: <64? MB)
Like one would expect, the 3D desktops are quite a bit on the heavy side when it comes to their resource needs. It's no surprise that the more traditional Cinnamon needs a little less RAM compared to the GNOME 3 Shell and that Unity needs by far the most. The needed disk space loses a little comparative value since with Unity I had to install the whole repo while for both Gnome 3 Shell and Cinnamon I just installed the full basic package.
In terms of absolute minimal RAM needed to launch I was quite surprised to find GNOME 3 Shell and Cinnamon working with as little as 81 and 72 MB! While they are far from usable with that little RAM, it was an interesting find (at least for me). While these two seem to check for a minimum of available RAM, Unity doesn't seem to do such a thing and tries to start with however little RAM the system has, even though it takes minutes to load with 64 MB of RAM! I didn't have the patience to try even lower values (and it doesn't make much sense anyway).
