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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 2 of my desktop testing series. We'll deal with 4 traditional GTK+-based desktop environments in this entry.
For test criteria and details about the basic Arch system used, please refer to the first part of this test:
Linux desktop comparison (pt. 1): Modern GTK+ DEs
GNOME 3 Classic - also called "fallback mode" - is a UI re-implantation in GNOME 3 resembling the "GNOME 2 way". It offers the familiar panel instead of the shell. However it is not on an equal footing with the shell but really meant only for those machines which cannot run the latter (most likely because of missing 3D acceleration). It's not working exactly like GNOME 2 as there are a number of (mostly annoying) differences but it may be dropped anyway in the future.
The GNOME 3 Classic desktop (PNG)
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit dbus virtualbox-archlinux-additions gnome
Memory usage right after starting up GNOME 3 Classic (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 Classic (3.4.2) MemTotal: 1030652 KB MemFree: 804524 KB Buffers: 15868 KB Cached: 94984 KB Rootfs: 1732056 / 1.7 GB [RAM used at startup: 226128 / ~221 MB] [Disk space (without base OS): 1077768 / 1.1 GB]
The MATE desktop project begun as a complete fork of the latest version of GNOME 2. Many people doubted (or continue to do so) if the project will last. While it started with one developer renaming all the applications (to avoid incompatibility with GNOME 2 and 3), in the meantime some people have joined the project, additional features have been added and with Linux Mint a big distribution has adopted it as one of its standard DEs. To just name one of the new features: Caja the file manager (formerly Nautilus) now has an undo option available in the menu (this was actually something that I had been missing since I left the Windows world)!
Additional repo "mate": http://repo.mate-desktop.org/archlinux/$arch
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit dbus virtualbox-archlinux-additions mate
Memory usage right after starting up MATE (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 + MATE (1.4) MemTotal: 1030652 KB MemFree: 878688 KB Buffers: 13536 KB Cached: 58112 KB Rootfs: 1348280 / 1.3 GB [RAM used at startup: 151964 / ~148 MB] [Disk space (without base OS): 693992 / 678 MB]
Xfce started as a light-weight desktop environment but over time it has grown into a fully-featured medium-sized DE. It's still quite a bit lighter than GNOME / KDE, of course. But if you're looking for something really light, Xfce may no longer be what you may want to install on your machine. If you however want a good compromise between a rather light-weight DE and great usability, give it a try. In some aspects it's somewhat like a less bloated GNOME 2 but it's going its own way in general.
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit dbus virtualbox-archlinux-additions xfce4
Memory usage right after starting up Xfce (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 + Xfce (4.10.0) MemTotal: 1030652 KB MemFree: 918092 KB Buffers: 11388 KB Cached: 49092 KB Rootfs: 1226416 / 1.2 GB [RAM used at startup: 112560 / ~110 MB] [Disk space (without base OS): 572128 / 559 MB]
LXDE is currently the most popular light-weight desktop environment available for Linux. It's designed with low resource usage in mind and built completely modularly. If you just need some of the applications it consists of, you are encouraged to simply use these. It is in a rather early state, though, and people who are spoiled by a full-blown DE might miss quite some features which LXDE simply does not provide. However if you are not looking for something that is visually appealing above anything else but just want a working DE with the basic functions - LXDE might well be your desktop environment of choice.
pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit dbus virtualbox-archlinux-additions lxde
Memory usage right after starting up LXDE (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 + LXDE (0.5.x) MemTotal: 1030652 KB MemFree: 938660 KB Buffers: 9744 KB Cached: 41816 KB Rootfs: 986260 / 963 MB [RAM used at startup: 91992 / ~90 MB] [Disk space (without base OS): 331972 / 324 MB]
Well, no surprises here: These GTK+-based non-3D desktops are in general quite a bit lighter on system resources. While it shows that GNOME 3 Classic is not optimized in this regard, even the full-blown MATE does rather well in comparison. Xfce is a little lighter still and LXDE the definitely the most light-weight DE so far.
I've dropped the "minimal RAM" thing this time as it is not of much use with these DEs. Each one can actually run with as little 32 MB - with heavy swapping of course. Like one would expect, GNOME 3 Classic is totally useless in this case while LXDE is a lot more responsive (but still far from being usable).
