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Comment by JJMalina | Hacker News Reader

How is Plasma in terms of CPU, memory, and graphics load? When I switched from Mac OS X to Linux six years ago I tried Ubuntu but I found Gnome to be incredibly slow and resource intense. Then I tried Xubuntu and I've used it ever since. I'm pretty happy running XFCE on two 4K screens with my desktop and on my hidpi Lenovo laptop. I've noticed Plasma continuing to improve and people recommending it so now I'm more keen to test it out.

Besides the improved UX are there any other advantages of Plasma over XFCE?

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Honestly, At this point, KDE is just as light as XFCE and Gnome is pretty low too. From my testing, minimal KDE on Arch or Gentoo install pulls it ~450-500mb at boot, Manjaro and Suse around 550-600mb.

Fresh Gnome on Arch or Gentoo I've seen ~650 at boot and around 750 with Ubuntu, around 650-700 with Fedora.

Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment, but KDE is quickly catching up. Nvidia still lacks, even with their EGL support. I use a Nvidia 1060 6gb on an updated (KDE 5.24), but several year old Manjaro KDE install with XOrg as a daily driver, and it's very smooth for me. Games work great. Maybe some occasional stuttering on my monitors that are 144 and 60hz (xorg limitation).

Gnome's gestures and by far and away better then KDE's too (at least as of 5.24, but 5.25 adds many more).

> Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment

Agreed, with a caveat— Gnome's Mutter compositor for Wayland has bugs. It does not support server side rendered window decorations while KDE does. This means that the title bars for Alacritty[0] terminal emulator and the mpv[1] video player are ugly and not so functional. This is an intentional decision by the GNOME team[2]. Also the screen locks while watching videos on mpv because Mutter does not support the idle-inhibit protocol, although work is currently being done on this[3].

[0]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5956

[1]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/7186

[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

[3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111

Ugh. I enjoy the GNOME look and feel but every thread on their big tracker makes me want to switch desktop environments. "Your standard is irrelevant because we don't want to follow it" is something I'd sooner expect from Microsoft than from an open source collective.

Also, Mutter does not support variable refresh rate.

The window decorations stuff drives me batty. Titlebar and buttons aside, there seems to be a widespread misunderstanding about window shadows. There is some vague effort afoot[1], but a surprising number of developers don't really care whether they're consistent (note, nobody even mentions shadows in that extremely long gitlab issue you linked to), despite the Gtk folks going to tremendous efforts to make them look nice for their specific toolkit. Which is great, until you have a Gtk 3 app beside a Gtk 4 app and it looks like they're each being affected by a different light source, begging the question: why do we even have them? Shadows are supposed to create a consistent sense of space and guide the eye around the desktop, but if they're all different, that isn't happening. They're just noise.

To be fair, it's difficult because Wayland clients might have rounded corners and other odd shapes, and I'm not in a position to really look into it myself so I shouldn't complain, but argh, the indifference about it is frustrating.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1517

No way, From my personal experience on my machine with 6gb ddr3, 5400rpm disk, i5 3rd gen KDE is so annoying to use and even multitasking is laggy while on xfce it's very smooth relatively. This was observed on Ubuntu, Arch and opensuse. Opensuse KDE was the worst of them all while arch with Xfce ran the fastest of them all.

Sounds like a configuration issue somewhere. I've run KDE on several computers with no lags, and I am quite sensitive to lags.

I also run KDE on an under-powered (even at the time it was released) x86 tablet released in 2011 (the Airis Kira Slimpad - Intel Atom N450 1,66 GHz, 1 GB RAM DDR2 @ 800Mhz, Intel GMA 500). It was the only desktop environment that was kinda usable on a tablet at the time. It's slow (this tablet is exclusively used to play music by auto starting Clementine), but not slower than anything else.

A 5400rpm disk is tough though with today's distributions and maybe Xfce does fewer disc accesses than KDE. You probably should disable desktop search if you haven't.

I guess it's the hdd thats causing the problems. I guess your tablet has emmc flash storage causing it to be pretty responsive compared to my machine that's better spec and newer too........

I think your issue is the 5400rpm disk. KDE uses a lot more of dynamic libraries (for various plugins) compared to xfce. On hard drives, that means a lot of random disk accesses, which tends to slow down startup speeds a lot.

Plasma (KDE) is generally lighter than XFCE these days. Highly dependent on how you customise each one of course.

IIRC there was a thread a while ago with benchmarks. And an XFCE developer confirmed that this doesn't surprise them, because KDE have a lot more dev resources to spend on optimisation than they do.

It's still heavy.

Other suggest that it uses same or even less memory than Xfce, that may be true on fresh boot, but it's misleading, because Plasma utilizes lazy load aggressively and also still leaks memory like crazy.

I tried to use it for a while and I noticed that memory grows quite a bit after using it for a whole day for example. I witnessed once plasma-shell process using 600MB and kwin 300MB, which is quite bad, worse than even GNOME. You can restart processes and it returns to normal, but I don't want to do that, I want DE using reasonable resources, not 1GB for showing wallpaper and few windows

To be fair, a DE does quote a bit more than just "showing wallpaper and few windows". If that's your only use, switch to something like Window Maker or maybe something even more sparse.

Can't really confirm, it's at 350mb now after 4 days of uptime - when I add krunner and baloo indexer, it's 630mb.

Probably depends on graphics and configuration, I have AMD graphics and 2 monitors.

Yes it's really heavy on my old machine but everyone points me to the benchmark numbers which gets me annoyed.

Regarding GNOME, that is what happens when most of UI stuff is running on JavaScript.

I also moved into XFCE.

KDE has the advantage of a full desktop experience, where all applications targeted to KDE can share the same developer stack and made to interoperate between each other, beyond classical UNIX IPC mechanisms.

GNOME had this as well, but seems to have been lost on their minimalism quest.

I run what I would consider a pretty heavy Plasma desktop, with latte dock, all the fancy compositing effects, and a few other additions. On top of that, I'm running several Electron apps, one Windows app in Wine, and Firefox with several tabs right now. My memory usage is 3.5GB.

I have been dealing with frame drops and not-so-smooth video since I updated the NVIDIA driver to version 515 on my Pop_OS! install on Thinkpad Extreme Gen 2 (last "good" version was 460). I thought of trying another DE to see if that makes any difference and with KDE, even though the graphics issues are somewhat still there, the performance is a definite improvement. I thought of trying KDE because I heard all good things about it and it has indeed been a joy to use. Now if only NVIDIA had the ability to produce some decent drivers for Linux...

Replying to myself in case any poor soul suffering from the same issue sees this. I generated /etc/X11/xorg.conf using "nvidia-xconfig" (it directly writes to this location so backup your existing conf in that location, if it already exists). Then I added the "ForceCompositionPipeline" option to the section for nvidia:

    Section "Device"
        Identifier     "Device0"
        Driver         "nvidia"
        VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
        BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
        Option         "ForceCompositionPipeline" "1"
    EndSection

Rebooted and the jankiness was gone and everything was totally smooth. Google "ForceCompositionPipeline" if you want to get more into it.

Phoronix benchmarks are showing for years now that KDE has the lowest footprint. Only bare window managers beat it.

Plasma consumes almost the same amount of resources as XFCE. However you tradeoff stability for shiny new features.

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