
A Memory Comparison of Light Linux Desktops - tanglesome
http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops-part-2/
======
hwh
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. No, no, I'm not about to play down
memory consumption as an attractive means to a fast UX. I see a point there:
Accessing that memory will take its time, being it RAM or not. However, memory
consumption is a bad metric. One back-buffer of the background image, if any
present, will make a difference of some megabytes.

The most important part, however, is to shed light on "memory consumption" and
how to measure it. The latter is a hard, hard task and there are odds in the
game. The values given by "free", specifically, are only a (bad) indicator for
the full system. E.g. have a look at those "buffers" and "cache" values. A lot
of factors play a role: filesystem (c.f. btrfs vs. ext2), allocator (glibc?),
sharing of dynamic libraries. I would specifically emphasize the last one:
When you're about to run mostly GTK based apps, you will probably profit when
your desktop has already pulled all GTK related dynamic libraries into memory
(e.g. GNOME, XFCE). Whereas some minimal window manager might have a small
memory footprint because it merely uses the Xlib/Xcb - an advantage over the
moment you start Firefox or GVim. Or you might want to use Qt based apps - and
that may profit from a desktop that pulled Qt in before (like KDE and others).

Having a compositing window manager also makes a difference memory-wise.

This said, pure code footprint _could_ be measured. It would be a hassle
though. And in the end, the real noteworthy differences are those you can
measure in actual time passing. Be sure to not only measure start-up, though.

~~~
txutxu
Agreed.

Xorg + a few fonts is more "heavy" (in memory numbers) than the 90% of those
dm/wm,

There are tools like x11perf, glxgears, and more, and at the end of the day,
you cannot compare "fluxbox Vs a desktop environment", because you should be
comparing fluxbox + cups + a desktop search indexer + a graphical filebrowser
+ a calendar service + this + that + ...

It's nice to see "the data", as "numbers", but you make a proper point about
how it should be interpreted.

When I had more spare time (this is more than 14 years ago), I did test a lot
of desktop environments. I did start with kde 1.X, and have use many version
of many desktop environments and WMs... my tip is: pick the one that makes you
"forget about it" and focus on your tasks.

Now living out of home and al the hardware I carry, and have access does not
have any problems. When I loved at my home, I had recycled computers, and
repaired by me ones, and if it was not ok for a graphical ENVIRONMENT (I don't
care if I don't swap after boot, I care if I swap WHILE USING) I just did use
such machine as a "headless server" and everybody is happy.

Other approach to low resources machines as the blog seems to talk about, is
to enable remote login (xdm, gdm, kdm, whatever) on a powerful machine, and
use the old one to just launch the X (raw) and the remote login/desktop client
in full screen.

A few years ago, I did see this numbers on my own for the environments I was
interested, and people used to tell me "xfce is light!!!", obviously, they did
come from lighter environments, maybe because they were used to heavier
desktops. I was used to fluxbox.

I was used to _forget_ about the WM and the backgrounds, and focus on useful
things (unless you are preparing a your screen for a Hollywood film or
something like that).

I just ask a responsive workflow. Most system do not provide that "by default"
and you have to "setup", "cleanup" or "shortcut"... you can do it in many ways
at many layers.

I like fluxbox by the following reasons: we did meet years ago, recycling
computers with low resources, I did learn the configuration (behavior and
keyboard) in half an hour and a few days of tweaking, performance/resources
never was a problem, I did forgot about "it" and "it" did let me "do stuff".
Until today this never failed/changed. That are my "numbers", I'm a happy
customer.

------
DanBC
My ram is fast. My disk is slow. I want things to be in ram to be ready for
when I need to use them.

The amount of ram a software uses seems like an odd metric to use, especially
when the ram hungry beasts mentioned in the article use less than 250 MB.

~~~
TomNomNom
I don't think the problem with the more hefty window managers is that they use
a lot of RAM, but that they _have_ to use a lot of RAM.

IMO, the fact that they require more memory can be considered a reasonable
indicator that they are more complex / do more stuff. They need to read stuff
from disk / generate data in order to fill that memory in the first place,
which takes time. I'm not an expert, but I would guess that using more memory
also increases the chance that some of it will be swapped to disk by the OS,
slowing things down further (although only intermittently).

~~~
mercurial
Yes, but at the same time, they are doing more. You get what you pay for.

~~~
DanBC
You've said what I meant to (but didn't) say.

Comparing IceWM and JWM seems fair, because they both do the same thing.
Comparing JWM with Gnome3 only on memory used for a vanilla instal is weird.

------
ims
Just came here to say: i3 is really nice. It's too bad he didn't mention it,
it's one of the more lightweight WMs in his bar chart.

If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. Was always intrigued by tiling WMs
but resisted for far too long because of a vague resistance to learning yet
another set of keyboard shortcuts. Seriously though, it's not bad at all.

[http://i3wm.org/](http://i3wm.org/)

~~~
muuck
I'm curious why you choose i3 over Awesome or Xmonad. I recently started
playing with tiling window managers myself after I saw a i3 presentation on
Youtube. When started looking into it I found much more documention on Awesome
wm. That's why installed that one on my machine.

~~~
siddboots
I've been using i3 for about two years. I sampled a few other tiling WMs,
including awesome, before settling on i3. Realistically there isn't much
difference between them in terms of the features that I personally use, but
these are the main things that sealed it for me:

* Tree-based/hierarchical tiling.

* Simple as hell multi-monitor.

* _Beautiful_ config file [1].

* JSON API [2]

* Modal, vim-like key bindings.

[1]
[http://code.stapelberg.de/git/i3/tree/i3.config](http://code.stapelberg.de/git/i3/tree/i3.config)
[2] [http://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html](http://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html)

~~~
m_ram
I haven't used i3, but I did use awesome for about a year before settling on
Xfce. The thing all the tiling window managers don't have is a compositor. I
don't care about shadows or animations, but it makes everything seem smoother
and faster. The compositor in Xfce uses xrender instead of opengl, so it works
pretty well even on low-end machines.

------
untrothy
Shame he didn't include xmonad, on my pc it takes about 7/8 MB, but I guess
you also have to consider another 4/5 MB for xmobar.

~~~
dons
I don't run xmobar or trayer...

It's nice that we don't need to write these things in C to be small and fast.

~~~
cm3
Me neither and I can't work without XMonad.Prompt, especially the Shell
instance, for spawning executables. I don't remember Tuumo's ion in detail but
the only other launcher that behaves similarly in a sane way is cwm's built-in
menu. dmenu_run doesn't work the right way and is limited in what it launches
or auto completes. Like ion there are also instances for ssh and man pages.
When using the shell prompt the memory usage goes up by 1 or 2 megabytes but
that's constant. Any time I try spectrwm or dwm I always come back to xmonad.

------
qznc
Why consider a 1MB window manager, when you are running Firefox (or Chrome)?
The browser is easily the most memory-consuming app on most PCs.

~~~
jackowayed
Up until December 2009, my main computer was a desktop we'd bought in 2000. At
some point, we had upgraded it from 128MB of RAM to 384MB.

That last year or so, things got rough. I was really pushing the limit of what
it could run without feeling unreasonably sluggish (with pretty normal
workloads of browsing, IM, and either word processing or Ruby coding). First,
I switched from Firefox to Opera. Then, I switched from Gnome to Xfce to
IceWM. This made a world of difference, and I really didn't miss Gnome. It got
me another 6 months+ out of that computer without being terribly frustrated
all the time.

In most cases, on a modern computer where you have multiple gigabytes of RAM,
I agree with you. But it's still nice to have those tiny window managers
around.

~~~
vacri
Depending on how you value your time, a $300 computer will run circles around
a 10-year-old computer, and will be far cheaper than the time spent trying to
shoehorn modern applications onto old hardware.

~~~
apapli
There's something quite satisfying about breathing new life into an old piece
of hardware, or extending its life further as in this case.

So although I agree with your point it's nice to not have everything boil down
to dollars and cents all the time :)

~~~
vacri
This is why I prefaced with 'how you value your time'. I completely agree with
you. If you're just after something that works, then just buy a new computer.
If you like the project of injecting longevity, then the tradeoff is that
you're getting entertainment out of your hours.

I'm very much a 'not dollars and cents' guy, but I see a lot of people
struggle to maintain old computers when they're not really into enjoying that
maintenance activity; those for whom an hour of troubleshooting -foo- is pure
frustration with no fun mixed in.

------
drostie
I had a nightmarish scenario a few months back where I was just trying to wipe
an old hard disk on an old laptop that still barely worked, so that I could
ship it off to an electronics recycling place. It was I think 512MB of RAM but
might have been less; but a few popular Linux LiveCDs wouldn't boot without
running out of RAM, and my `prng` script uses Python3 among other things.
After trying desperately to set up swap on a thumbdrive before the computer
ran out of memory, I eventually just caved in and went to a comp shop to find
an external hard drive case for old laptop drives. I was lucky, found one for
relatively cheap, and wiped it from my own computer. And doing that sort of
command from your own computer is quite terrifying even if you think you've
taken the proper precautions, you're still double-checking everything to make
sure that /dev/sdb is really where the random bits and then zeroes should go.

So these articles are appearing a little after I'd have liked to see them but
they're a welcome overview in any case. :D

~~~
eterm
Or you could have just booted to a console with no WM at all and wiped it?

~~~
zhemao
He could also have used /dev/urandom to generate his random bits instead of
running a python script.

~~~
andor
Or /dev/zero, much faster.

------
CanSpice
I like how the author editorialized about the RAM use of Unity ("Too bad it
runs in 192MB of memory! It would be a good idea to trim it down, let’s say by
50%. As a note, DOS conquered the world by running in 64KB of memory.") yet
said nothing about KDE's, while KDE in "bare minimum required" mode required
more RAM than Unity did.

------
wtbob
I've really enjoyed using stumpwm: not only is it a tiling WM like ratpoison
(in fact, stump's a successor to ratpoison, written by the same guy) or
xmonad, but it also means that I always have a full Common Lisp running, which
I can connect to in emacs via SLIME.

It's not quite as good as a Lisp Machine, but it's better than nothing.

------
D9u
I find this comparison to be flawed in that the base system used is not very
frugal.

Tiny Core gives you a GUI desktop in an under 12 MB iso.

[http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/](http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/)

That said, I'm sticking with FreeBSD & dwm.

------
tehwalrus
I use XFCE because I run debian in a VM inside MacOS and I don't see much
reason to run _two_ RAM guzzling window managers (I have lots of RAM so I can
run scientific code that often needs 4-5GB at once, mostly for python code I
intend to optimise when I have time). At 70MB by this measure, it seems like I
made roughly the right choice for a window manager that leaves me lots of
other space free for 'real' data (but still loads enough of GTK to run Eclipse
as my dev env.)

------
ElongatedTowel
I'ts weird to say this, but I actually quite like the interface of Windows
Vista and up. Xfce and the likes always were enough for me. But there is one
tiny little feature I miss. Sortable windows on the taskbar.

I guess one day I have to write my own window manager and taskbar adding to
the huge amount of stuff that's already out there.

~~~
jeltz
Sortable windows are there in Xfce taskbar, but maybe you meant they are not
in recent Windows version (I do not use them often enough to remember).

~~~
ElongatedTowel
[edit] Nevermind, found it. Seems to have been removed and brought back a few
versions ago. Neither as useful nor as visually impressive as the Windows
version though.

No I meant Xfce. I can't find that function. Are you refering to sorting by
rules? I mean ordering windows by drag and drop. As far as I know no window
manager or desktop environment allows that except the Windows desktop. It even
does it in an very elegant way.

If I have VirtualBox open and a machine running I can drag both windows in the
taskbar together and say, position them behind my browser.

~~~
jeltz
Since I do not use the sortable taskbar I never noticed when they removed and
then re-added it so I assumed it had always been there.

------
blinkingled
Getting rid of mysqld and the file indexer should make KDE run in just under
100 megs. Decent for what it provides.

~~~
dfc
Wow, I thought this was a bad joke about KDE being bloated. It is not, KDE
actually requires a local mysqld instance for PIM data:

[http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2009/02/19/kde-42-bring...](http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2009/02/19/kde-42-brings-
the-mysql-server-to-the-desktop)

~~~
blinkingled
Yeah, initially it gave me a real heartburn but given the state of Gnome 3 I
decided to live with it! Some enterprising programmer should really rewrite
from scratch a light weight but functional Exchange/IMAP client and calendar
app. Heck I wouldn't mind taking the Android code and using Java UI bindings
for KDE if that's what it takes :)

------
thelittlelisper
I'm very happy with xmonad. I'm running a very minimalistic desktop consisting
of fast applications that do one thing, do it well, and can be controlled from
the keyboard (zsh, urxvt, emacs, remind, mutt, zathura...).

As a very welcome side-effect, the whole thing is very light. It runs in a few
tens of MB.

------
untothebreach
As an aside, I never knew about Trinity[1] before this article...I am spinning
up a VM to try it out on right now, as I always liked KDEs style, but disliked
the bloat.

1: [http://trinitydesktop.org/about.php](http://trinitydesktop.org/about.php)

------
txutxu
You get what you pay.

A international CMS, or a static .html ?

This is the same.

If you just need to throw a paragraph (or to "just manage "other programs" and
forget about the "environment" and you don't feel it's slow, then... any of
the two options is ok.

------
eterm
Are you running out of RAM when using a desktop? If not, why even worry about
the memory usage?

More useful would be, "How long does Firefox/Chrome/etc open in this WM". If
there is a difference then that would be more meaningful.

~~~
NegativeK
I've dipped into swap due to virtual machines. It was extremely painful.

But the article mentions this in the conclusion:

> If you have some ancient hardware that you need to breathe new life into, or
> if you need to fit a distro on a modestly sized memory stick, the first
> thing you should look at is the window manager/desktop environment.

For me, it's a lot easier to drop Unity for XMonad than it would be to switch
away from something like Chrome. If I actually want to do something with one
of my old laptops, this might be relevant.

------
fiffig
Man, KDE is heavy. Plasma-desktop takes up 194MB here (which matches nicely
with his +7MB openbox session), but Kwin, as most KDE users will arguably
have, adds 99MB.

So a total of 293MB for KDE. Almost double as much as Gnome 3.

------
ExpiredLink
Is memory consumption a real problem for desktops in 2013?

~~~
rav
The OS will use free memory for disk caches which will help speed up any
modern desktop. That's the 'cached' column output by `free`. My computer
currently reports 18 GB used out of 20 GB, but 15 GB of that is disk caching.

The more memory your desktop environment grabs, the less memory is available
for disk caching. It might not be a problem, but it certainly pays off to
invest in extra memory and in decreasing memory consumption of applications.

------
Havoc
tbh the need for this is steadily decreasing. Sure I've got some old laptops
that might need this spec wise but frankly by the time I've installed & set it
up I'm already contemplating suicide. Systems with that little RAM also tend
to be _seriously_ slow...

