💾 Archived View for paritybit.ca › arboretum › knowledge › fedora-36-spin-resource-comparison.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:54:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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For each spin of Fedora 36 (including GNOME):
CPU, by grabbing the terminal window and moving it rapidly in circles and recording what the average CPU usage is.
RAM, by reading from the htop display.
Disk Space, by running df -h and recording the value for root.
I was running Linux Mint Cinnamon on this system before replacing it with Fedora, so I figured I'd record these stats:
Some very interesting conclusions here!
First of all, it's important to note that disk usage is not necessary good or bad. Of course a desktop environment like KDE or GNOME will use a lot of disk because they have a lot of pre-installed programs. Whether the installation takes up 2GB or 4GB is not likely to make much of a difference unless you're installing Fedora onto a 16GB drive or something like that.
Moving onto CPU usage, this was not a particularly scientific test, as I basically just jiggled the terminal window around a lot and recorded a rough average of the total CPU usage. It's not a typical way someone would use these environments, but it was still insightful and was able to show a clear difference in the drawing performance of different desktop environments. Note that the CPU result for i3 isn't really meaningful, since it's a tiling window manager and you're not typically dragging windows around; everything tends to stay still. Also note that the difference in CPU usage is quite exaggerated on such an under-powered system. You'd likely notice single-percentage differences on a more recent machine. Even modern Celerons and Atom processors are more powerful than this processor, and you can get single board computers with more computing power.
RAM usage is probably the most accurate and meaningful statistic to come out of this. I left each system running for at least two minutes before recording the amount of RAM used, as an initial boot and login seemed to have some activity going on in the background (probably update checking and that sort of thing) which settled down after a bit. The numbers presented here are rounded to the nearest 10M.
This is how each spin stacks up, where those at the top of the list used the least amount of resources (i.e. they performed the best):
CPU:
1. LXDE (20%)
2. GNOME (25%)
3. KDE (30%)
3. LXQt (30%)
4. Cinnamon (40%)
5. i3 (45%)
6. XFCE (50%)
6. Mate (50%)
RAM:
1. i3 (360M)
2. LXDE (470M)
3. LXQt (480M)
4. MATE (590M)
5. XFCE (600M)
6. Cinnamon (830M)
7. GNOME (930M)
8. KDE (1010M)
I was extremely surprised at how this turned out for the two major DEs. Both GNOME and KDE have reputations of being heavy desktop environments, but both are among the lowest in CPU usage, though they have the worst RAM usage. Looking at the actual numbers, they are effectively the same as far as resource usage goes, with KDE being just a tiny bit heavier.
Naturally, i3 comes in at the lowest RAM usage since there's not much going on in a simple window manager like that compared to a full desktop environment. As expected, "light" desktop environments used the least amount of RAM, with LXDE being the best performing floating window desktop environment.
If you don't have very much RAM at all (4GB or less), you should consider running one of the lighter desktops. If you have 8GB or more, however, any desktop here is perfectly adequate for most uses. I have no problems running GNOME on this machine, where I tend to have a couple of browser tabs, a terminal window, and a chat application open.