Gnome-Budgie-xfce on MX19.1 ahs

[asqwerth]

-- these DEs are NOT memory hogs. As a matter of fact, gnome & budgie use 10% LESS (yes, Less) RAM on my machine than xfce4 uses.
-- gnome & Budgie are only about 5-10% heavier than dwm, hlwm, bspwm, openbox
The basic setup/installs of gnome Basic and budgie idle at 780-790MB of RAM on my platfform; xfce4 idles at 880-890MB of RAM.

Two years ago when I changed from Xfce to Gnome, I came to the same conclusion. And the setup is easy.
viewtopic.php?f=100&t=56971

That's not my conclusion though.

I autostart MX19 with 2 conkies, variety, radiotray, and bl-hotcorners daemon. RAM at startup for XFCE idles at 705MB (according to MySysInfoConky) if I don't open a browser or other program.

If I open htop in addition to the above, which I did to check how accurate the conky's RAM reading was, RAM usage went up to 735MB. And yes, the conky's RAM reading was the same as htop's.


On my 2nd MX19 install, with 1 conky, variety, radiotray and compiz + fusion-icon autostarted, the RAM did idle at 900+MB, so it appears that compiz does take up about 200+MB in resources.

[rasat]

The RAM usage will vary on different machines. asqwerth, if you have not yet installed the Gnome, then install and check what it takes.

[manyroads]

I guess I'd offer the following thoughts, and these are personal opinions:
-- gnome and budgie are about the same memory size as xfce4 on my platforms, with similar infrastructure.
-- mx installs seem to be about 10-15% lighter than arch-based (fwiw).
-- I still like hlwm, dwm, and bspwm best. They are about 5% lighter than xfce4...but that's not why I like them better. (I enjoy them more... and love to tweak them.)

I'd recommend use whatever 'floats their boats'. This is linux and ought to be fun.

[asqwerth]

The RAM usage will vary on different machines. asqwerth, if you have not yet installed the Gnome, then install and check what it takes.

I have Gnome installed on my Anarchy (Arch-based) and Fedora partitions on the same machine. No doubt this is not Debian, which may or may not be lighter. These 2 Gnome distros always show slightly higher RAM than XFCE on MX, for my usage.

This is the conky showing my RAM usage of 864MB on my Anarchy gnome install (I have variety installed there as well):

gnome-ram2.jpg

Perhaps if I disabled the following gnome-shell extensions :
1. dash to dock (i don't like not having a dock/panel which can indicate what opened windows I have)
2. arc menu (akin to a searchable Whisker menu)
3. appindicator support (for "systray" notifications)
4. mpris indicator button (which is similar to my XFCE pulseaudio plugin which I always add to my XFCE panel)
5. openweather (to show weather, which I have in my MX conkies or which I could seek out the xfce plugin for),

I might get a "basic" gnome installation (I'm assuming that is what rasat manyroads is referring to) that uses less RAM than my XFCE install.

But to me, that would remove all the usability I require of Gnome, and would remove things that I expect to come standard in a DE, ie, extensions nos. 1 to 3 at the very least.

So I'm not saying Gnome is that huge a resource hog nowadays, but I'm saying that if you look at what I include as autostarting in my XFCE setup, I get 705MB for RAM usage, while a similar-usage setup on Gnome would consume more RAM.

I definitely do not have my MX install consuming 890 MB for a basic/default setup.

[manyroads]

btw. I have found that I am able to use sxhkd with gnome, xfce, openbox, bspwm, hlwm and dwm thereby standardizing my keybinds and normalizing (reducing?) mem use (on average). I have not tried any othe DEs or WMs with sxhkd.... generally because I don't 'feel like it'.