My last article was about the performance and memory consumption of the popular open source KDE and GNOME desktops. Well, it seems that that particular article was submitted to Digg. I looked at some of the comments that people posted, and I specifically wanted to address this one comment in particular.
Today I read an article comparing KDE and GNOME. It covers a number of criteria, including customization, configurability, ease-of-use, and dependability. But some major criteria I really didn’t see much about were those of performance and memory usage.
Let me start off by saying that I have not performed any formal benchmarking of either GNOME nor KDE. I have never really bothered to peruse the source code of either system to any great extent. What I say comes directly from my experience as a user of various versions of both desktop environments.
With consumer-grade 3D graphics hardware becoming better on a daily basis, it’s no wonder that people have considered the idea of a three dimensional desktop. I read an article today comparing two such desktops, Project Looking Glass and Beryl. While my experience using such systems is fairly limited, I have to express some skepticism about whether or not they bring any productivity gains.
I have worked with various UNIX systems many times over the years. One of the most prevalent systems in industry has been Sun’s Solaris. While I tend to use FreeBSD and KDE these days, I saw a post at Slashdot that talked of Solaris and CDE that I wanted to comment on.
I know a number of people who advocate the use of Xubuntu on resource-constrained desktop systems. But there has recently been talk about how the resource usage of Xubuntu is growing at a rapid pace. Along these lines, today I read an article that considers the use of Ubuntu Lite as an alternative to Xubuntu for those with low spec computers. I haven’t used Ubuntu Lite myself, but I would like to make a recommendation of an open source UNIX-like system for low-end desktop computers: NetBSD.
As most Ubuntu users know, GNOME is the default desktop you’ll get once your installation has finished. For many people that is fine and dandy, but there are others, myself included, who prefer other desktops over GNOME. I have a preference towards KDE, so the Kubuntu distribution appealed to me. Others prefer XFCE, and so a distribution like Xubuntu may be what they’re looking for.
I have really started to look forward to the release of KDE 4. For a number of years now I have used KDE as my primary desktop. My main reasons for using it are that it is very well integrated, and it otherwise is of a very high quality. I haven’t performed any formal benchmarking, but I do think it is more responsive than GNOME. One study have indicated that KDE actually uses less memory than GNOME in many cases. Perhaps this extends to its need for CPU resources, as well.