Comments on: Xfce versus LXDE

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:23:33 +0000

Personally, I am not a fan of either Arch or Gentoo. As for services that exist on install, it is a matter of creating a distro that appeals to their primary audience. However, I do not see a reason to run sshd on any system that is not a server. By the same token, I do not see why many distros run the bluetooth daemon, when there is not a bluetooth interface.

As for a comparison between LXDE and XFCE, I try to insure that the same daemons are running to insure a reasonable measure. I am getting ready to write a comparison between PSLinuxOS XFCE and PCLinuxOS LXDE releases.

By: dE

dE — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:11:26 +0000

Ubuntu and it’s variants and complete piecea crap… the binaries made are rubbish, too many services are running in a fresh install (even ssh) and it ain’t even that easy compared to other comparable distros.

If you gotta compare, do it in arch or Gentoo (the latter is preferred)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:03:53 +0000

[...] [...]

By: Bill

Bill — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:43:12 +0000

The memory usage depends on the applications started. Since LXDE is rather short on the application side, the default install often includes XFCE and Debian applications. Try the test with only LXDE applications.

By: Raul Saavedra

Raul Saavedra — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:09:21 +0000

For the record, tried also Debian plain (no graphical desktop environment installed). Right after booting, free command shows used -/+ buffers/cache to be:

Debian (plain): 12.2

By: Raul Saavedra

Raul Saavedra — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:03:02 +0000

I’ve installed Debian+LXDE, and Debian+XFCE, both on separate identical virtual machines (VirtualBox) with 256 mb of RAM each.

Right out of the box and after booting them, the free command shows the following results (used -/+ buffers/cache), which show them to be pretty much equivalent, at least much more so than what the posts above suggest:

Debian+LXFE: 52.8
Debian+XFCE: 57.5

By: Bill

Bill — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:04:56 +0000

It has been awhile since I ran those test. The machine used for those tests is now running Xubuntu 9.10. While I like LXDE, it still has a ways to go. In addition, I had to hand edit too many desktop files to get them to integrate in LXDE.

By: deval

deval — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:49:09 +0000

simple question: what is the result of ‘free’ command after ‘tweaking’ stuff (put the wifi back to work, etc)?

By: Bill

Bill — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:34:36 +0000

You are correct in that each distro loads different software as part of the startup. This is not limited to just the desktop that you mention. Actually, an easier test is to check the RSS of each major component of the desktop. While this number varies, it is a reflection of the actual consumption. A better test is to take snap shots of RSS for the key components of a desktop over a period of time. I have also noticed that there is a large difference in amount of memory held in the cache for the different distros on the same machine.

By: Tanios

Tanios — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:39:58 +0000

I think your comparison is not fair as you compare two really different things.

The Xubuntu version installs and runs a lot of services at startup (printing, wireless, network manager, xfconf, bluetooth, other gnome services for compatibility, etc.) and the XFCE panel is sometimes really charged with applets that use a lot of memory too, while lxde does not run automatically all the services needed at startup (you need to put them yourself under ~/.config/autostart) and the panel doesn’t have so many plugins.

So to do a fair comparison, you need to start over of a minimal install (from the mini cd, command line install, and then everything manual) and make sure you have the same small amount of other things running to be comparing really only xfce to lxde.