Much has been written about desktop environments in Linux and *nix environments. One of the recent controversies has erupted after Canonical rolled out their Unity DE in what used to be the world’s most popular Linux distribution: Ubuntu. This Extremetech article outlines the great fall from grace that Ubuntu took after Unity. Others have rallied in defense of the design choice. While I certainly could weigh into the muck and start slinging, what we are really talking about here are matters of taste and individual interpretation. I thought it might be better to do some objective testing to add to the discussion.
Performance is a major deciding factor for me when it comes time to choose a DE. While Ubuntu may no longer be top dog, the various DE specific releases allow for reasonably stable bases from which to compare performance between environments. As of 13.10, Ubuntu comes in:
Ubuntu Unity
Ubuntu Gnome
Kubuntu for KDE
Xubuntu for XFCE
Lubuntu for LXDE
The chart below outlines the unbuffered memory usage after loading the desktop environment and opening only the default terminal in order to issue “free -m.”
The results are in some ways surprising. I did not entirely expect KDE, for instance, to have substantially lower usage than Gnome or Unity. Other results are less unexpected. Xubuntu is touted as being light and the entire selling point of LXDE is being the lightest.