Comparing LINUX DESKTOPS performance and resource usage (on the Slimbook Evo 14)

I appreciate that it is peertube

I haven't watched the video yet, but keep in mind "resource usage" being lower isn't always better.

For example, Plasma had an issue for some people where animations would not happen, freeze the system momentarily, and stutter. The reason why turned out that these people were using slow drives. Plasma was trying to load the bytecode for the QML animations from disk, but the IO operation took too long so the animation suffered. Had this bytecode been stored in memory, the performance would have been better.

But I also don't want to discount the fact that some (perhaps most) of the time, high resource usage is a bad thing caused by poor programming and using technologies that are heavier, like Electron. Whether those tradeoffs are worth it are another matter.

I wish more developers actually used their software low-end devices to find performance issues. I recently got an Intel N100 and it's actually been a decent experience on Linux, though Gnome shell's animations are a bit stuttery even on Gnome 48. Haven't tested any other desktop though.

The most important parts are at the end of the CPU and GPU performance sections. They performed the same across all desktops. On most modern systems the desktop you use is not going to have any significant impact on your performance, when software you're running requires resources, they will be directed towards it.

Also, low RAM usage is massively overrated, especially by Linux users. Your RAM is there to be used, leaving it unused is a waste. It is good for your desktop to be caching a lot of data in RAM when it is otherwise unused. It's only an issue if its still utilizing an excessive amount of RAM when other apps need it more.

I recently tried Bluefin and Aurora, and KDE Plasma felt way lighter. I didn't measure it properly so I can only share my anecdotal experience FWIW.

It's an intel office laptop running the OS from a USBC M2 NVME SSD Caddy.

Measuring these uncustomized directly after booting is a pretty flawed metric, especially with something like KDE that has a lot of features that can be enabled or disabled. i.e. many features that are built into KDE might need external programs that are not included in the base install of LXQt or XFCE, and some stuff might get reused when you start opening LibreOffice, Firefox or a text editor (AFAIK this is definitely a thing if you use a lot of KDE/Qt applicatons). The desktop comparisons I saw during KDE 5.x had it at not that much more RAM use than XFCE, and I doubt this changed that much with KDE 6. Maybe something about Wayland, though? e.g. XWayland might eat additional resources. Also, the baseline RAM use seems really high when even XFCE uses 1.4GiB by default.

For the record, I use LXQt, not KDE.

i love this guy's videos and i bought my last laptop using his discount code; i was waiting for him to provide a slimbook code since i was planning on buying one, but now i think i'll look for something else.