These numbers are bad because they are not really about what desktop environments use but about what the entire OS will use since they rely heavily on the OS configuration for that.

A much better approach to check how much resources DEs use is to capture the memory use before and after the DE itself starts, ignoring even X server (as this too can use different memory depending, e.g., on the drivers, hardware and/or other configuration parameters - all of which are outside the control of a DE).

As an example by placing `free > free-pre` in my .xinitrc before starting Window Maker and then `free > free-post` at the end of Window Maker's own startup script (which is run after the desktop is launched) i found that my WM setup uses 11MB of RAM (on a 64bit x86-64 machine - it'd most likely use less on a 32bit machine). This is however also on my setup where i have a bunch of dockapps launched that aren't part of a default Window Maker installation - disabling those puts the resources Window Maker needs down to 8MB of RAM.

These are way more realistic for Window Maker (and basically what i'd expect it to use) since my OS (openSUSE) at startup uses around 3% of my available RAM (32GB) and i'm certain that Window Maker doesn't need 1GB of RAM to work - which makes sense since pretty much all of that is used by other processes, like systemd, postgres, bunch of managers, etc.

Most numbers seem too high to me. KDE and Gnome are definitely below 2GB out of the box and Openbox using >600MB also seems pretty high. A lightweight system like Alpine or Void can be at ~150MB of RAM usage with a window manager.

RAM usage comparisons including the whole OS aren't that interesting imho, run a couple programs and you'll never reach those numbers again until the next reboot. RAM isn't intended to be empty.

Same, I did an install with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and the latest KDE desktop environment with all optional packages and goodies, and after a fresh boot into KDE with Konsole opened, the RAM consumption was from 580MB to under 760MB, similar to XFCE.

I don't know how the author got those huge numbers but I fell like something is off with his FreeBSD installation/configuration and is skewing the results.

I'd take those results with a huge boulder of salt.

Agreed, something really off here. I used fedora plasma until 2 months ago and on boot it was always less than 1Gb. Once I started ides and things like intellij then I would see ram usages in the 2 to 3 gbs.

Sameish numbers here. I thought KDE doing just as good (and even slightly better) than XFCE (in the RAM department) was kind of a well established fact at this point.