Performance difference between desktops.

[jharris1993]

Greetings!

One question that I see pop up in these fora is "Which desktop/distribution is best for [insert system]?"

I'd like to add my observations in the hope that they will help others make a sane and useful choice.

99.9999999 . . . . 99999 . . . 9999% of the time, the choice of distribution / desktop is one of personal preference, and there is no real difference performance wise once the sytem is up and running. (At least there is no difference apparent to me.)

However, on a system that is resource starved or has a sub-optimal graphics card, Cinnamon may not work at all, or may work very poorly. The other distributions, including KDE, should work and give you a reasonable display.

I discovered this when setting up a Dell PowerEdge 2850 Server Class systen that I picked up for a song at the Trenton Computer Festival a few years ago. Since this is a true "server" type of machine it has two defining characteristics:
(1) It has a set of Brass Balls when it comes to hardware.
(2) Video support is pathetic, especially since most of these systems are expected to run headless in a server rack somewhere, or at most without a GUI.
(it has the equivelent of an ancient ATI Radion chipset with about 1/3 of the normal graphics memory avaliable.)

I wanted to set up a sandbox LAMP server to experiment with, but I also like the convenience of a GUI.

What I discovered is that Cinnamon would not work on that box at all. The live CD and / or an installed system just could not handle the limited graphic capabilities of this box. Even in "Compatibility mode" using every trick in the book that I know of, the GUI would not run at all.

However, the other three distributions would "work", with "work" being defined as "show the desktop and be usable with a mouse and keyboard right out of the box".

Based on speed/responsiveness, I rate the three remaining desktops like this:

First place goes to XFCE.
It's a very lightweight desktop that should run on just about everything including a wet pancake. If you have an absolutely ancient system that won't run anything, it will probably run XFCE. The downlide is that its toolset is more limited, though it is far-and-away a better choice than something like Puppy, Tiny Core, or Damn Small Linux. Especially if, like me, you want to install a LAMP stack on it running Apache and MySQL.

On a severely limited system, or something on ancient hardware, I wuld choose XFCE because it's more like a "real" desktop environment, and it's reasonably easy to work with without jumping through hoops.

Second place goes to Mate.
Though more resource intensive than XFCE, it's more of a full-featured desktop and I found it easier to work with than XFCE. Toolset wise, I find it essentially equivelent to Cinnamon, except that it works on this limited system. Aside from that, if it works in Cinnamon it will probably work here. (i.e. Things like GParted, Disk Analyzer, etc.)

Third place goes to KDE.
It's a bit more resource intensive, but just so long as you keep the eye-candy turned down, it works just fine in this severely limited environment.

Ultimately I ended up choosing Mate 13 for this server based on the availability of useful graphical and command-line tools, along with the ability to run well on a system with such severely handicapped graphics.

In a more "normal" environment - "normal" being defined as a system with a reasonably current graphics card / chipset, there is no reason why you could not choose any of these distributions since most of the heavy graphical lifting is done by the graphics card / chipset.

The bottom line is this:
If you are working on ancient / limited capability hardware, and you discover that Cinnamon doesn't work, you may wish to try the other desktop varieties before throwing in the towel.

What say ye?

Jim (JR)

[JRG]

Hi Jim,

I was rather surprised not to see any comments on your post.

I happen to agree with you; however, I switched from MATE to Xfce as it seems more responsive to me and I haven't found anything I cannot do.

I've also been toying with SolydX on an even less powerful machine than my regular one. It seems even more responsive (SolydX with Xfce, that is — one can get SolydXK with KDE).

[k357k9]

Second place goes to Mate.
Though more resource intensive than XFCE, it's more of a full-featured desktop and I found it easier to work with than XFCE.

I found Mate to be only a little more resource intensive than XFCE before LM17 on my system. It was not enough to give up the better features and more friendly approach. I run Cinnamon now and it is doing the job.

[konjad]

When it comes to system requirements and using resources it's like this:
LXDE < Xfce < Mate < KDE 4 < Cinnamon

It's not how fast they are, on modern computers they are all fast and have about the same performance (assuming you have at least 4GB of RAM), the only difference possibly being some graphical effects in KDE/Cinnamon. On the older machines though, I would not go beyond MATE (and even then I would prefer Xfce), KDE 4 and Cinnamon do need a modern hardware. In addition, Cinnamon tends to perform worse because it's still far from being optimized (there are ocassional memory leaks if running system for a prolonged time without rebooting, or so I hear, because personally I don't like Cinnamon at all and I used it only for a short time).

[jharris1993]

@konjad

I did not include LDXE because it's not one of the "stock" Mint configurations. At least not on their web-site. At least not that I saw there. . . . .

Thanks for the input though, I might take a peek at it later on.

What say ye?

Jim (JR)

[Jedinovice]

I understand that Cinnamon has been rather improved and optimized since August. I wonder how it would perform now in the comparisons?

And, yes, KDE can respond well even on limited hardware if you turn off desktop effects.