SEP
12
2006
|
Desktop memory usageThis was actually supposed to be a follow-up to my tests of startup performance of various desktop environments, primarily KDE of course :). In fact I even did most of the benchmarks some time after the startup ones, but, alas, I'm much better at writing things that computers are supposed to read than at writing things that people will read :-/ (some volunteer to write good user documentation for KWin's window specific settings, BTW ;) ?) I even meant to make a somewhat more extensive analysis of the numbers, but having never found time to write that, I decided I should publish at least a shorter variant with all the numbers and some conclusions. You can do your own analyses of the numbers if you will. These memory benchmarks are meant to measure various cases of desktop configuration and compare KDE to some other desktop environments ... and since it's actually a bit too long for a blog entry, I've put the complete version here. I'm not going to put any numbers here, but let me say that some of the numbers comparing KDE, GNOME, Xfce and Window Maker are quite interesting (and they come from one of my favourite hero tools Exmap, so they shouldn't be completely off the track). However, one thing I'm going to copy here is the final section titled The things we should learn from this:
So, if you want to see the numbers and the rest, here are the full details.
|
![]() |
Comments
KDE kudos and Konqueror rant
Your tests confirm my experience with Xfce. Though it loads faster, once you load all the apps you need, your advantage is eaten up by the lack of "synergy" of a bandwagon of apps not sharing much.
Gnome numbers surprised me a bit, I thought it was lighter, at least in the very minimal setup. So Kudos to the KDE's good work!
Konqueror is the only KDE apps that still stays in the limbo for me. While I appreciate it as a file browser and a CVS frontend (Cervisia, I love you :) ), for web browsing I switched to Firefox more than one year ago, annoyed by misrendering of web-pages or even worse, things like failures while updating images on ebay and some issues with Plone portals. One year after the switch I started appreaciating the rich "market" of Firefox extensions and, why not, the ability to update it without updating my desktop. Now I am not so hot any more about Konqueror as a web browser, even if rendering problems have almost disappeared. It should seriously offer optional Gecko-integration (KHTML does not work for everyone) and an extension mechanism รก la Firefox.
/Nicola