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Comment by mikae1 | Hacker News Reader

This is really an amazing and underappreciated desktop environment.

If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not because LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn efficient these days.

I use Plasma but I can really recommend the LXQt file manager PCManFM-Qt (catchy name ha?). It's a really snappy and no nonsense file manager that feels right at home in Plasma. I prefer it over Dolphin.

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> PCManFM-Qt (catchy name ha?)

I believe PCMan was the original developer, and FM for "file manager" made sense. Then it was ported to Qt, so add -qt?

That's kind of a mess, isn't it?

Still, it makes a bit more sense than "Dolphin" or "Nemo", and you'll probably never actually see these names if the desktop file is configured to show a generic name for your desktop environment.

"Dolphin" and "Nemo" are more memorable, and they don't need to make sense: what does the Amazon rainforest have to do with online shopping? Nothing at all. But it's a catchy name and the company is very successful.

In KDE, if you navigate through the K-menu to Applications->System, you'll see "Dolphin", and in smaller text underneath, "File Manager" so you know what it is.

Wait for the release for VR

Worlds within worlds.....

> If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not because LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn efficient these days.

Not according to these benchmarks:

https://itvision.altervista.org/linux-desktop-environments-s...

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

Typically on lower end machines I disable Akonadi (the PIM data storage service) and Baloo (file indexer). Some systems don't enable them by default.

I'd be interested to know how much of an effect that has.

yeah, baloo would crash anyway lol, as it always does.

Unfortunately for me it does not crash. I have to kill this monster myself.

> If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not because LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn efficient these days.

I doubt it. Have you got any benchmarks?

Eh. If you want to save RAM & CPU, i3 is where it's at.

xmonad

Can confirm. A fresh boot of plasma eats up around 666MB of RAM. Not much more than the so called lightweight distros, sometimes even less than them, and plasma is a full on DE not a gimped WM.

For benchmarks, just Google them yourself or spin up a VM yourself.

I don't think a fresh boot is the best benchmark for this. I do use plasma and in my experience memory usage tends to go quite a bit higher with use, even if you close everything. I don't think they have leaks and it's probably just memory some data structures and the allocator hold onto for various reasons.

> around 666MB of RAM

A decade ago, that was a lot of RAM for a desktop environment. In the late '00s, I remember Ubuntu with Gnome 2 using around ~128 MB of RAM right after boot.

What happened? Most DEs aren't that much more complicated than they were a decade+ ago. Is it the array of supporting libraries (Qt and Gtk) that get loaded into memory? I could see that being a problem since even the "lightweight" DEs like XFCE and LXQt rely on them heavily.

I haven't checked but I bet a significant part of that is just increased image sizes. Icons and everything are going to be uncompressed in memory and if they're now 256x256 where they used to be 32x32 or whatever, it probably adds up.

There's probably also things like unicode data (ICU is like 20MB), more daemons (WiFi, rendezvous, Bluetooth, etc.), and I think C compilers have generally optimised for speed at the cost of code size over time.

Let's not forget that nowadays each pointers takes 8 bytes (64 bits) instead of 4 bytes like it was the case on 32 bits systems most of us grew up using, and often have the numbers for in mind. Executables are bigger because of that, and so are their stack and heap (probably not twice as big but probably not too far from that!).

Around 2012 XFCE would use around 448MB. That's more than a decade ago.

XFCE's resource consumption went up significantly after it got ported from GTK2 to GTK3, the same thing also happened with MATE.

Every pixmap is in much higher resolution nowadays, fonts have much more characters, more buffers are used, people use caching and precomputation more because it makes the apps snappier, etc.

I dunno, my Plasma 5 desktop is lightyears more functional than any DE I was running a decade ago - though I do agree with sibling comments that the RAM delta is probably more to do with pixmaps and pointer sizes that code bloat.

There is also the case to be made that RAM is made to be used, and that half a gigabyte is a perfectly reasonable amount to allocate to a snappy desktop in a world where even the lamest new computer has at least 8.

Sure, I agree that 600+ MB of RAM use is not a big problem for most people, but the context here is in the comment I was responding to, which pointed out that it's not much more than the "lightweight" DEs, so you might as well just use Plasma.

My point is that that's a recent-ish change, the lightweight DEs used to use less than 150 MB of RAM, and it's rather surprising how much the gap has closed. I don't know any truly lightweight DEs; to get small you have to use a tiling WM like i3 or sway.

> A fresh boot of plasma eats up around 666MB of RAM. Not much more than the so called lightweight distros,

I used Xfce for well over a decade; maybe closer to two. It has long been one of the so-called lightweight environments, and it deserved that reputation when I started with it, but its memory footprint has grown significantly over the years. I don't think it makes a good benchmark for "lightweight" any more.

I'm on Plasma now. It has definitely improved in this department over the same period of time, but it's not what I would consider light. More like middleweight. To be fair, it also seems to be doing more than old Xfce did, with things like QtWebEngine presumably offering GUI functionality of some kind. (Akonadi was another memory eater when I last did a default install, though I think that one is easier to avoid these days.) If wonder if LXQt shuns components like that, or loads them only when needed.

> For benchmarks, just Google them yourself

I've done that already. None of the ones I've seen show that Plasma is anywhere near on par with LXQt.

I'm finding that Plasma 6 on Arch is using almost twice the VRAM as Gnome 46.

Plasma generally scores in the best quartile in Phoronix benches.

> I doubt it. Have you got any benchmarks?

Here is my set on Ubuntu 22.04:

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2022/08/18/ubuntu_remixes/

And from 2013:

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/04/26/xbuntu_round_up...

KDE is not lightweight, but v5 is not as bad as older releases were compared to the contemporary competition.

he sayin the truth but de is not about memory only, its about cpu disk usage and all the apps that comes with it, plasma on lar with lxqt but still lxqt won on all other resources

I used LXQT for a week or so as a daily driver while I was picking envs (eventually landing on i3), and I found LXQT to be buggy and lacking. That was, oh maybe 3 years ago though. So assuming steady development, I hope it’s gotten better.

It’s also maybe not fair that this was on a dell laptop that didn’t play particularly nicely with Linux.

Plasma is not efficient, it still uses ton of memory and leaks memory like crazy. Last time I've tried to use it, which was last year I think, plasma-desktop and kwin processes alone used 1.5GB after full day of work.

I switched to LXQt because it's power management, e.g. suspend the laptop if the battery goes below whatever percent, actually worked whereas KDE's wasn't and such a basic feature breaking (and causing me to lose work) made me too mad to debug it. I'm sure it's fixed now, but that was only the final straw for me. KDE tries to be too fancy and ends up buggy, whereas LXQt is simple and just werks.

If you like LXQt but would prefer lower RAM usage, then consider LXDE. Even with NetworkManager and PulseAudio, mine only uses 300MB.

Unmaintained since 2021. The program is the same man, and he moved on to LXQt.

* programMER

Sorry. Dr Hong Jen "PCMan" Yee.

so misleading, please stop saying things like this, plasma efficient at ram bla bla bla. but plasma eat resources, CPU hogging it even eat cpu for moving a pointer, and the index system sucks

I use MATE, but I prefer PcManFM-Qt over Caja most of the time. It is really good.

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