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Comment by vermaden | Hacker News Reader

My take on the same subject on FreeBSD:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/07/12/desktop-environmen...

It's not a great comparison, the environments seem to be mixed together rather than installed clean / separately. For example xfce lists mate-screensaver and kalendarc - I don't think you'd see that on a pure-xfce system.

Why would software just installed on system increase memory usage?

XFCE is not suppose to start/load KDE components and vice versa ...

It's not just installed, it actually got started based on your process lists. I don't know how bsd and xfce specifically work in this case, but some educated guesses:

- depending on whether you restarted between tests or not, DE shutdown may not clean up all services

- xfce may have a list of supported service alternatives and mate-screensaver was started as the expected-preferred one

- some services may be registered to be stated together with the GUI through the .desktop files, which may explain kalendarc

But as I said - just guessing here.

I have done full poweroff(8) before each DE test.

I did not configured them to start.

For some reason these DEs started them - do not ask me why - ask these DEs creators.

Packages on FreeBSD are rather 'vanilla' - only ported to work properly on FreeBSD - so its pointless to ask FreeBSD port maintainers here.

The only thing I configured to start were in FreeBSD main /etc/rc.conf config file:

    % cat /etc/rc.conf
    hostname="freebsd"
    ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
    sshd_enable="YES"
    moused_enable="YES"
    powerd_enable="YES"
    dumpdev="AUTO"
    zfs_enable="YES"
    dbus_enable="YES"

Regards.

Comparable results though everything in FreeBSD is like a gig more for some reasons.

It's a bit a unfair comparison because you have include the ZFS-Arc AND Inact ("buffer" in the other test). Also tested under virtualbox = less drivers, buffer flushed, pipewire linux, pulse-audio freebsd? and so on...it's hard to compare those two test in this way.

That depends what you use to measure.

At first I used RES column from FreeBSD top(1) command.

Here are results for the same desktop environments from other tools:

                | htop(1) | conky(1) | freecolor(1)
    ------------+---------+----------+-------------
        FreeBSD |  112 MB |    - -   |  157 MB 
        Openbox |  237 MB |  460 MB  |  382 MB 
           MATE |  508 MB |  778 MB  |  788 MB 
           XFCE |  533 MB |  794 MB  |  829 MB 
    helloSystem |  585 MB |    - -   |  830 MB 
          GNOME |  625 MB |  990 MB  | 1000 MB 
     KDE/Plasma |  730 MB | 1659 MB  | 1167 MB

This table above is also at the end of the blog post.

So as You see depending on the used tool you may get REALLY different results while having the same components started.

Regards.

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