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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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!).

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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