@wpeckham, you're right, I forgot to include DE's versions, sorry.

I'm also including the RAM consumption after a cold boot (my last post was about the storage size in disk):

LXDE 0.10.1
363 MB

LXQt 1.0.0
367 MB

Xfce 4.12
431 MB

Xfce 4.16
476 MB

Gnome 40.1
575 MB

KDE 5.23.5
582 MB

As you can see KDE, is the worst one regarding memory consumption.

You may have different results because you have your own configurations and on a normal distro it's impossible to test different DEs without contaminating each other, while on Porteus you can really have different DEs running without sharing any libs/settings.

You may also be interested in this topic about performance on different DEs.

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Oh it is depressing.
Most of us are the same when it comes to candy, we want to put it in our mouths.
Been using full DEs for 20 yrs. Mostly KDE after they integrated some of Compiz Fusion's features.

I have an image of my base, the caches and kernel source are on another drive and symlinked to keep it small.
It's been restored 10s of times trying different configs.

And I did install the full Plasma 5.23.4 (latest stable) before my internet plan renewed to use up leftover bandwidth and get all the packages. It's menu is very impressive with a ton of apps I'll never use, I was gonna make an image of it, but decided to create a keyboard shortcut to shut off the screen through kwin. After giving it a run Plasma somewhat crashed, lot's of shortcuts not working, no graphical method of shutting down, reboot etc. Same story after multiple reboots so I wiped it off and install Plasma-desktop which is missing Konsole, Kate, Kwrite, Kscreen, Power-devil, Dolpin etc. The menu is naked but it's stable.

Took an image of that one, might work on it later. Compiz is spreading rumors proclaiming it can act as both compositor and window manager, I will play with that soon.

What's depressing??

As long as I'm busy using the OS, it's awesome with nothing more than a hopped up xterm, clear crisp display and command line apps. Just having the colorful text scrolling by is apparently satisfying the need for candy.

Motion is where it's at
If you've nothing practical to do with your OS, nothing "appeasing" is flashing before your eyes unless you are playing with the candy.

I have installed Manjaro MATE in my mom's laptop, who is 73 years old. It has NVIDIA Optimus, and is working fine, with the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

One pamac update -a --enable-downgrade, every time there are new updates, and everything is fine.

Running KDE 5.23.4-1 on Manjaro on my Pinebook Pro KDE takes 180Meg RAM. This does not count Xorg under it. It also does not count the ream required by the windows I have open on top of it that do not report as part of the KDE consumption.

You can run the "free" command in terminal (in Manjaro it defaults to -m option).

Sure, but that only gives you the total node memory and swap stats, it does not tell you what a specific process, program OR DESKTOP is using: this making it invalid and inappropriate for this discussion. I am only interested in what KDE, GNOME, or other desktops require.

I haven't used KDE for a long time, due to personal preferences, so I do not know what information its Task Manager provides.

You can install the package lxtask-gtk3 or the package lxtask (it uses gtk2), which is LXDE's task manager, very lightweight.

It displays the used memory per process.

You may view the images attached.

Attached Thumbnails

   

I certainly could do that, but why would I want to? the normal audit and process reporting utilities give me all of that information and more, and from the command line so that it is DE independent. Do you know about things like TOP and HTOP and PS?

I find smem very useful for this
Note the PSS column. The link above explains why it's important.

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Thank you for the good advice.

I could not find a way, to make smem to display the memory units in Megabytes, and I found out smemstat that does this (smemstat -m).

Belated thanks to OP for #22 (MX review for me)!

An interesting LONG '2022' 'Linux problems' article I just ran across: https://itvision.altervista.org/why....p.current.html

You have not made clear what is it you're actually testing for and if your tested for the same things for every distro you tried.

Incidentally, Lubuntu 21.04 has reached EOL and is therefore no longer supported so go figure.

It sounds more like to me that you either have faulty hardware or are using uncommon hardware with an uncommon setup trying uncommon use cases. You mentioned nouveau so my hunch is that you're using Nvidia on your setup only. Nvidia is known in the Linux community for being a PIA for many reasons... the number one is they are PROPRIETARY (i.e. they are not open source). Testing is therefore limited for all setups.

You did not provide many details for the Xubuntu problem so we cannot help you.

You did not give clear details on what you tried for your Lubuntu install using the installer (Calamares). Lubuntu did not make the Opera install "easy" because just like any other distro, Opera is not something usually available as it is not open source. Discover likely tried to install the snap package for Opera. As for why it failed... go to Opera, not Lubuntu. Linux distros aren't responsible for packages they cannot package or properly test for.

I am not a fan of Manjaro/Arch but you mentioned trying both Lubuntu and Manajro yet you did not complain about Calamares on Manjaro. Did you know they use the same installer? It's all the bit possible that Manjaro sets up Calamares differently on their image than Lubuntu but since we (again) don't know what you actually tried to do, it sounds more and more like you have faulty hardware (or you don't know what you're doing).

While I can agree that some distros do not make the initial, "out of the box" experience the best experience, Linux is still pretty much used by folk who can figure out what they're not getting from their desktop. Most distros come with documentation for using their system and while that may not be ideal for those without immediate Internet access post-install, you contradict yourself by admitting you were eventually able to figure out how to install something extra... apparently without using some manual. This basically proves that getting the end result was actually intuitive after all. Go figure.

Also, Clear Linux is arguably and (probably) admittedly not catering to the traditional desktop experience... if you read anything about them, they are an Intel crafted distro for the server/cloud space likely only (supporting out of the box) what Intel deems appropriate. It is a fairly recent distro so I don't understand why you're trying that out expecting something out of it.

The only thing I can hard agree on is that Gnome is not a very sensible desktop environment and that is because Gnome is not catering to the ideal use case for UI/UX. Gnome is catering to their own ideal version of design much like what M$ did with Win8. It didn't work with M$ and it won't work with Gnome and that's why forks exist. That's why System76 is thinking of making their own DE after dealing with the garbage heap that Gnome is. Gnome 40? Really?

Anyway, your rant is wasted on yourself as you failed to provide any real useful information for what you have and what you actually tried to do. Good luck.

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While this article makes a better point than OP, both fall into the same trap: they say "Linux (as a whole) is ...".
Whatever follows after will, almost by definition, not hold true for all use cases.
OK, there's the additionl "desktop" qualifier (after all, we wouldn't want to include all the world's routers and webcams here), but the diversity remains.
GNU/Linux as a desktop OS is most of all flexible, open therefore changeable, extremely diverse. Unlikely most OSs it usually gets compared to.

Additionally, here's my favorite counter argument for these type of statements (like "Nvidia doesn't work on Linux" or "the ootb experience sucks" etc.):
Have you ever tried installing Windows from scratch? My experience: you run pretty much into the same problems as with "Linux", with the added insecurity of not having centralised package management.

Also the article GentleThotSeaMonkey linked is very old - at least 10 years. They might have edited it just this year, but I doubt they went through each and every statement to see if it still holdss true after 10 years.
Just on first glance, I know of a few things that definitely got much beter since 2012, across most distros.

Lastly: Licensing.
It is not "Linux" fault if Nvidia still haven't opensourced their drivers.
Intel graphics work perfectly on "Linux", because their drivers are open-source. They actually work with Linux, not against it (whether their involvement in kernel development is actually a good thing is a separate topic).
Incidentally they don't make gaming GPUs, but the argument "don't use Nvidia if you want to get the most out of your hardware with Linux" still makes sense.
Same for many fonts btw. Big companies have the resources to throw money at intricate font development, and you cannot distribute those on "Linux".

No, the more I think about it the more I believe this article is some form of very intricate rage baiting. In the future I think I'll link an archived version instead. Don't give them the clicks.

PS: the comparison to proprietary OSs is implied, but definitely there.