Each desktop has its own strengths and weaknesses. Usually picking a desktop is a very personal preference based on features, looks, and other qualities. Sometimes, what you pick for a desktop is limited by hardware constraints.
In this article, I will show you the most popular desktop environments and its resource usage. I have a KVM virtual machine with 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, and 32 GB NVMe storage.
GNOME
Gnome Desktop Environment is one of the best and popular desktop environments in Linux. GNOME isn’t a lightweight desktop environment, it’s not a good choice for old PC or laptops.
KDE
KDE is one of the best-known desktops and is the desktop with the most potential customization. You may also refer it as the “Plasma” desktop. KDE is not a lightweight system.
LXQt
LXQt is a lightweight Qt desktop environment. It has comparatively low resource requirements.
LXDE
LXDE is an extremely light desktop environment that focuses on high performance and low resource usage.
Xfce
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources.
MATE
MATE is a fork of GNOME 2 created when GNOME 3 was announced and some users wanted to keep the traditional GNOME 2 interface going
Cinnamon
Cinnamon is the default desktop environment for a flavor of Ubuntu known as Linux Mint a fork of GNOME 3
Results
I have a clean installation of each desktop environment and now take a look at Ram usage from high to low.
- GNOME
736 MB Memory used - KDE
633 MB Memory used - Cinnamon
631 MB Memory used - MATE
540 MB Memory used - Xfce
453 MB Memory used - LXQt
400 MB Memory used - LXDE
235 MB Memory used
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