The future of Xfce

[longbottom leaf]

i am happy and pleased with mx 19 and xfce.

manyroads. does manyde's/wm's running on one partition bog down vs having only i at a time? I apoligize for the stupid question. And no - not trying to srgue - just asking per asqwerth's question.

[dreamer]

i am happy and pleased with mx 19 and xfce.

manyroads. does manyde's/wm's running on one partition bog down vs having only i at a time? I apoligize for the stupid question. And no - not trying to srgue - just asking per asqwerth's question.

Yes, it does, because more services will be added to boot and login. After installing a DE it's good to look at startup applications in Xfce and see what has been added. I have never seen Xfce use 900 MB after boot, but it's of course possible with many services running. Add proprietary GFX, wifi and newer firmware packages and then it's almost like Windows (OK, not quite, since it's still Xfce).

Xfce (just the DE) probably uses 200-300 MB, but the GTK3 version will use more because of mandatory accessibility. Someone claims he runs Gentoo with "almost full" MATE DE with less than 100 MB RAM and that includes his custom kernel!

So I think any RAM numbers should be taken with two hands of salt!

[asqwerth]

i am happy and pleased with mx 19 and xfce.

manyroads. does manyde's/wm's running on one partition bog down vs having only i at a time? I apoligize for the stupid question. And no - not trying to srgue - just asking per asqwerth's question.

Yes, it does, because more services will be added to boot and login. After installing a DE it's good to look at startup applications in Xfce and see what has been added. I have never seen Xfce use 900 MB after boot, but it's of course possible with many services running. Add proprietary GFX, wifi and newer firmware packages and then it's almost like Windows (OK, not quite, since it's still Xfce).

Xfce (just the DE) probably uses 200-300 MB, but the GTK3 version will use more because of mandatory accessibility. Someone claims he runs Gentoo with "almost full" MATE DE with less than 100 MB RAM and that includes his custom kernel!

So I think any RAM numbers should be taken with two hands of salt!

That's what I suspect about manyroads' system as well. Although he is choosing just 1 DE or WM to log into, I suspect some of the applications or services from some of his other WMs might be running even if he is logged into XFCE. There may be tons of stuff being autostarted, that isn't default. I don't really know as I don't use pure WM without DE nowadays.

[longbottom leaf]

thanks - that is what i thought. However, not knowing what all of you people do - i was wondering.

[imschmeg]

https://linuxreviews.org/Xfce_Classic_B ... NOME_Light

[JmaCWQ]

Awesome, I vote for Xfce Classic

[Shifu]

After having spent the last 8 months with MX and really enjoying the speed and traditional interface of the XFCE environment, I am disturbed that soon it seems XFCE will abandon what makes it special. I test the other distros but nothing comes close. The CSD interface is just an ugly mess with no redeming features and Mate, KDE, Cinnamon either too restrictive, ugly, bloated, or overly complicated. The whole thing about fixing XFCE grip-ability is a joke too. All that is required is a properly designed window decoration theme with borders 5 px or more wide.

I hope that, if XFCE does indeed go down this pathway, that MX can find a way to keep CSD out of its implementation and retain the speed and simplicity it is loved for.

[az2020]

Of course the term light weight is mushy. What does it mean, small ISO, low CPU, low memory. all of the above? You can have a distro with a huge ISO that installs many packages and is still "light" on CPU and memory usage.

I agree. I've done some comparisons of distros' mem usage. KDE comes out surprisingly small (when it's always been known as a heavy desktop). I ran a KDE distro (Kubuntu 19.10) as my daily desktop the past 6 months and it felt large, sluggish. Even on an above-average power/resource laptop (Ryzen 5/Vega 8 with 32g mem & SSD drive). I think KDE is doing more dynamic loading of libraries which makes it appear to be low-mem usage when idle. I think there's more granular loading of libraries (or whatever), which adds to what I perceived as heavy/slow'ish. I even disabled much of the eye candy animations and it still felt like a large distro.

I just came back to MX (19.2 ahs, yesterday) after 19.1 didn't work with that laptop. MX is noticeably more snappy, responsive. But, based on the memory usage comparisons, KDE distros (Neon, Kubuntu) are about the same mid-weight size as MX. So, there's something else going on. (I should try MX's KDE variant to see how it compares. I don't know if my experience was KDE or the specific distro I used.).

[richb]

I ran Kubuntu for a while, latest LTS version. I did not find it slow or sluggish at all. The machine it ran on is not a powerhouse. It also has integrated graphics in the processor. Perception I suppose.

Code: Select all

 Topology: Quad Core model: AMD A8-7600 Radeon R7 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G bits: 64 
  type: MCP L2 cache: 2048 KiB 
  Speed: 1689 MHz min/max: 1400/3100 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1547 2: 1416 3: 2292 
  4: 1767 

[wdscharff]

With the rapid development at XFCE it will take a while until I have to think about it, although I'm currently using Fluxbox almost exclusively anyway


Personally I am not too interested in the RAM demand in idle mode. So 50mb more or less.

Current Mint /Cinnamon e.g. had 750mb, but I didn't investigate further, on the disk is now the KDE beta.

Just compared, my xfc has less than 600mb after startup, the KDE beta (where there have been some updates) is also less than 600mb.

If you want less, you have to use Fluxbox, because after what I "hide" there I get below 350mb.

I find the behaviour under heavy load more interesting
I recently wrote something about it on Facebook, but my focus was not on ram requirements, but was related to thread load and thermal behavior of the very first version.
The subject was settled, but while I was at it, I still did my stress test:

Current handbrake from the test repo, freshly installed, identical settings, format conversion of a camera video with 1920x1080/120frames/sec to 1920x1080/30 frames, (vfr, rf21, preset:placebo)
Original file 800mb (sony a7III video, losless)
target file resulted in a size of 43,4mb each time

averaged from 3 runs each
fluxbox 53,16 frames/sec
xfce 52.82 frames/sec
kde 50,14 frames/sec
And all 3 versions oscillated from 1:30 min between 93-95 degrees celsius and cooled down to 45 degrees within one minute after completion.

I repeated the experiment today under more realistic conditions.
More realistic means, in addition Firefox with 2 open tabs, file manager open and QMPLay2 working on its playlist (I almost always listen to music on the PC).
The two pictures actually say enough

KDE Beta

fullscreen
https://web57.ws/test/kde2.png


MX-Fluxbox

fullscreen
https://web57.ws/test/flux2.png

The minimum speed advantage of Fluxbox this time was 1.5 frames/sec (2,5%)


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