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30 August 2017 makes those antique numbers, obsolete, and distorted by sitting on Ubuntu.
You can't run a DE by itself without an OS but considering that the test has been done one the same machine with the same OS the evidences are unquestionable.
KDE is the heaviest since 2002 when I started my adventure using only GNU/Linux without dual boot.
To hope to have responsiveness with KDE on a 4GB machine, you are right in this, it's needed another GNU/Linux.
Fortunately ...buntu != GNU/Linux
It's plenty of lighter choices on which run KDE avoiding also third parties distros based on ...buntu family.
but considering that the test has been done one the same machine with the same OS the evidences are unquestionable.
Maybe two years ago, but that Phoronix data is ancient compared to the data at my previously provided Forbes URL. KDE did in fact announce yet more improvements in RAM usage with 5.17 in October, in addition to those over the past two years.
Here's some more current data, from 4 old multiboot PCs equipped with DDR2 SIMMs totalling 2048 GiB. None had any attempt made to equalize any of the others. Except for bringing the 4 Tumbleweeds current, I just collected what was available from what was already installed. Each X startup was immediately post-boot running only Konsole in order to run inxi -SI. I made no attempt to discover what post-updates startup processes may have been running that may have terminated and freed up RAM if given enough time. I tried to include more distros, but on these oldsters with 2 GiB RAM, the pickings were slim. Mageia 7s and Fedora 31s on these 4 all have broken DMs and/or no KDE, and the Ubuntus are all 16.04 and/or only IcwWM and TDE. All Debians are only IceWM and TDE. I have more with only 2 GiB RAM, but only with TDE or KDE3 and IceWM and/or not current enough to be relevant. Compositing is disabled on all, as was any sort of user data indexing. All filesystems are EXT4. The main two things shown following are:
The difference between booting to text mode and booting into a DE, which was as little as 46.7 MiB on Buster with IceWM, and as much as to between 296.0 MiB and 347.3 MiB on Tumbleweed with Plasma; and
Percentage-wise there is a lot of RAM remaining for apps to run in. People who only do one or two things at a time shouldn't need more than 2GiB even with KDE5.
KDE did in fact announce yet more improvements in RAM usage with 5.17 in October, in addition to those over the past two years.
This should be a rough baseline for others to compare with Gnome, XFCE and the lighter weight DEs, and other distros.
Ehy mrmazda, keep calm!
It seems that you are a KDE developer.
You completely miss what already stated in the previous posts.
I summarise.
To answer to the question which starts the post:
Kubuntu is not suitable for 4GB machine it's needed a memory upgrade or to choose a lighter distro out of the ...buntu and derivatives family i.e. PCLinuxOS KDE (minimum required 2GB ram) cause, maybe due to the fact that Canonical supplies its OS to Dell they are interested in helping Dell to increase sales to demonstrate the benefits given by the partnership.
Anyway also with lighter distro to avoid to have a crappy system which continuosly swap also with swappiness 0 on 2GB machines you have also to avoid spyware bloated browsers like Chrome and Chromium cause with a single page opened Chrome launches 4 processes and has a 400MB memory consumption by itself.
As you see I don't charge only KDE cause the trouble has more than one cause.
Distribution: Slackware64-current with "True Multilib" and KDE4Town.
Posts: 9,152
Rep:
I've been comparing the numbers between Xfce and KDE4/5 for years, i.e., ever since that disaster known as KDE-4.0. I had been a big fan of KDE up until that point.
I don't have the numbers handy and would be lucky to find them if I looked as I would jot them down on a yellow pad. However, on the same hardware and making an effort to be running the same applications, over the last few years KDE and Xfce have been very close. IIRC, last time I did a comparison, KDE was running fewer processes, but was using 80 megs more memory than Xfce. These days that is pretty close. I have always wondered why KDE reports, via gKrellm, two users and Xfce only reports one user.
All on Slackware64, BTW.
Edit in: The GPU also run six to ten+ degrees warmer in KDE vs. Xfce.
Last edited by cwizardone; 01-03-2020 at 08:15 AM.
Distribution: openSUSE, Raspbian, Slackware. Previous: MacOS, Red Hat, Coherent, Consensys SVR4.2, Tru64, Solaris
Posts: 2,809
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by ludist
I think KDE is a disaster for memory. Only XFCE here for many years. I never worked with KDE the last 10 years.
That may have been true 10 years ago but I'm using the latest KDE (at least the latest that Leap is pushing out) with swappiness = 50 and I'm hardly seeing any swap use. With 8GB RAM, a bunch of swap (~4x physical memory), a slew of Firefox windows open with multiple tabs open in each, T-bird running, Emacs running, and Jack playing music, only about 4% of my swap space is in use. Unless I'm doing something that really eats memory up, I hardly notice the impact of swap use---I place equal sized swap partitions in the middle of the disks (to minimize head movement) and set them up with the same priority to have the system access them on a round-robin basis. I hardly notice when swap comes into play. I'm much likely to notice performance degradation when Firefox encounters poorly written Javascript (having multiple tabs opened to Amazon is a heavy browser load, too) and/or T-bird gets tangled up running some script that pegs the CPU. Those events have much more of an impact than swapping.
"The distro was robust and fast. No problems. Plus, it purrs quite nicely. On idle, the memory is usage is about 500 MB...CPU was mighty quiet, though, barely ticking above zero when there's little to no desktop activity."
On battery life...
"... this would mean 4.5 hours, in line with previous Plasma findings, or at the very least more than 4 hours easily. Quite impressive."
"The distro was robust and fast. No problems. Plus, it purrs quite nicely. On idle, the memory is usage is about 500 MB...CPU was mighty quiet, though, barely ticking above zero when there's little to no desktop activity."
On battery life...
"... this would mean 4.5 hours, in line with previous Plasma findings, or at the very least more than 4 hours easily. Quite impressive."
Do you turn on the pc only to look how is nice KDE Plasma?
Me not, to me 500MB only to run a bare system are resources thrown in the loo.
With the same ram I use a pc.
I couldn't download a 2GB monster iso but I discovered on Distrowatch the announcement of Q4OS always with Plasma 5 but with Debian Buster as base OS and the iso was only 800MB so I've downloaded and dd-ed it to check on my daily driver.
With a suckless base (Debian instead of Ubuntu) you save still more than 100MB ram.
But... emerged that KDE Plasma 5 seems completely inefficent and causes high memory consumption peaks which makes the systems damn sluggish i.e. more than 5 seconds on an Atom N455 1,6GHz 64Bit CPU only to open a terminal.
Maybe who started the thread was running other (maybe a browser) too and this caused the swap usage during the peaks generated by KDE.
To make you happy I post the htop of Q4OS and antiX iceWM both done on the same machine with the same programs (a terminal and xpaint) opened and a screenshot with memory footprint of the OS with KDE running the aforementioned 2 apps.
If you like to waste resources... up to you.
Update Jan. 6th 2020
Maybe I was wrong.
The 100MB saved aren't due to the base but...
Yesterday I tried Artix Linux LxQt on the 2015 UEFI HP laptop and on my daily driver an Asus eeePC with an Atom N455 and bios.
Booting the same live dd.ed on the same usb card the memory consumption of the fresh started system on idle on the UEFI HP (UEFI boot) is 275MB, instead on the eeePC (Bios boot) the memory used is exactly 175MB
100MB less.
It seems that Dedomeido has booted Kubuntu as UEFI Boot on an UEFI machine and this also demonstrates that Intel sucking "better" technology serves only to craftly increase system requirements so not IT savvy will run to the shop to buy a new, not really needed pc.
Last edited by walker; 01-06-2020 at 07:53 AM.
Reason: New findings
This has been a very entertaining and informative debate, but as a really old guy who has been involved in the use of desktop computers since the very earliest days (1970), I will make a prediction.
But before I do let me say that my observations of humanity both in person and from reading history tells me that greed (and some say evil) will ALWAYS win against goodwill and altruism because evil is willing to wait and never, never gives up. After all England still has a king! In the US, banks still print the money and then "lend" it to the treasury (despite Andrew Jackson winning briefly).
That's because greed is a primordial instinct that is in all of us to a greater or lesser degree. Humans are just as prone to instinctive behaviour as any other animal and don't realize that is why they do the things they do. EXAMPLE: Even though Microsoft has ALWAYS had the worst wordprocessor imaginable, they won. The strategy at Microsoft was to just keep chipping away at its competitors year after year, bribe reviewers, force manufacturers to include their software, and otherwise do anything other than write a good word processor.
The other part of the equation is that the masses become dumber every year (people should watch Idiocracy) :-)) and want convenience irrespective how much that convenience harms them. My wife is a perfect example. I had to isolate her machine from the network because she wants all that stuff (facebook, twitter, Netflix, gmail, bouncing baby videos) that seriously compromise the security of her computer. I am constantly having to clean it. She uses the cloud even though that makes absolutely no sense for a home user (or anyone else, in my opinion). Now whoever owns the cloud she uses also owns her data. She doesn't care because for her it is so convenient. If you don't believe that they own your data then carefully read every word of the 30 pages of the Microsoft, Dropbox and Apple and Google agreements. It says they can use your data anyway they want (in legalese) without your permission. This level of convenience seeking falls into the hands of the greedy corporations. By the way, my wife graduated summa cum laude in engineering so she is not stupid. Its simply a choice.
And now Microsoft is part of the Linux foundation! Their plans are insidious, but people have been duped, and are running around saying "look, Microsoft is embracing open source, they are no longer evil." Nothing about Microsoft has changed except their strategist and strategy. Instead of playing a no-win game of confrontation they will now seek to eventually control Linux completely. They see the threat from their greatest evil competitor (Google )and are going to try a flanking maneuver.
So my prediction is that open source Linux will no longer exist in 20 to 30 years. If anything it will be like Android (Linux owned by Google) where an ordinary user has almost no access to the code and the OS is controlled by a "for profit" corporation. I'm sure the code is available somewhere but I have not been able to find it. What remains of open-source Linux will be a tiny niche OS for the very skilled and what is available will be controlled by large corporations. Linus will die of apoplexy (unless he sells out). :-)) Fortunately, I will not live to see that day and young people are too naive to be aware of the risk.
So my prediction is that open source Linux will no longer exist in 20 to 30 years. If anything it will be like Android (Linux owned by Google) where an ordinary user has almost no access to the code and the OS is controlled by a "for profit" corporation. I'm sure the code is available somewhere but I have not been able to find it. What remains of open-source Linux will be a tiny niche OS for the very skilled and what is available will be controlled by large corporations. Linus will die of apoplexy (unless he sells out). :-)) Fortunately, I will not live to see that day and young people are too naive to be aware of the risk.
And yes I am a cynic! :-)
Your prediction is wrong.
Linux is already dead cause when a project like Debian is full of duckies which follow a Big Blue Corp (read systemd) it's the death door.
What a init! Someone has been also forced to stop systemd resolv to surf the net due to systemd bugs, with resolver enabled system won't resolve names.
But why is also dead?
Stallman has not been wise enough, he was too good inside to look at his back, he had too much faith in humanities.
They get rid of him to weaken free software movement.
Torvalds is a lowland and has sold himself for money (greed is a cancer this time you are right) he forgot who he was and where he started.
GNU/Linux was becoming too dangerous for Big Corps they bought what they can buy and eliminate who was not on sale but there's a justice.
You are old, you remember VA Linux
It doesn't take long, the worst financial crash ever is coming and for big corps they will be a bunch of troubles.
We will laugh.
Fortunately someone lasts i.e. antiX, Devuan, Slackware, PCLinuxOS, artix and a few more but we are to few to teach and not it savvy don't care about freedom cause they are not old like me and you and they don't know history
GNU/Linux on everyone desktop hope is definitely dead not GNU/Linux by itself.
For who has will to learn it will survive always if people leave flags (Read distros) and work together to build One GNU/Linux. IMHO
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