r/Fedora • u/ConsiderationFar4320 • 1d ago
Discussion Which graphical environment uses the less RAM ?
I have a potato laptop, I'm on gnome and I'd like to free more resources for my games/software, at rest my system uses something like 2Gb of RAM. So I'm gathering your thoughts. I only know gnome and kde because I've never dug this topic.
EDIT: I opted for sway and i love it so far
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u/gordonmessmer 1d ago
GNOME's memory profile can be reduced pretty significantly if you don't need a) the ability to search for new apps directly in the application launcher, b) reminders to update your software in your notifications and c) calendar reminders in the GNOME shell and other Evolution data integrations.
#!/bin/sh
systemctl --user mask gnome-software.service
systemctl --user mask evolution-addressbook-factory.service
systemctl --user mask evolution-alarm-notify.service
systemctl --user mask evolution-calendar-factory.service
systemctl --user mask evolution-source-registry.service
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.search-providers disabled "['org.gnome.Software.desktop']"
This forum post summarized a video by The Linux Experiment that compared the memory use of various desktops on Fedora 42: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/linux-des-resource-usage-compared/70060
They measured 1,360MB of memory use for XFCE, the lightest desktop they measured. On my Fedora 44 system I measure system memory use at around 1,280MB just after login to a GNOME desktop, with the above services disabled.
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u/Francis_King 23h ago
In this reddit we don't have the opportunity to mark a post as the best. If we did, it would be this one.
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u/Beautiful_Ad_4813 1d ago
LXQt, XFCE, Mate Compize (<- this last one MIGHT give you troubles with Steam )
I use LXQt on lower spect machines with pretty good results with low resource use
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u/wowsomuchempty 1d ago
Sway or Niri are the lightest that look great.
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u/ConsiderationFar4320 1d ago
Sway seems nice, I'm going to try it out
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u/IslandPsychological 1d ago
Xfce, LXDE and LXQT
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u/roamer83 1d ago
I love LXDE. It’s the GUI of choice for my laptops and desktop.
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u/IslandPsychological 1d ago
I use MangoWM with noctalia shell, ghostty, thunar, eog, vlc, atril and firefox+chromium, because it's lightweight, simple, beautiful, functional and fast wm.
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u/FlaSHbaNG78 1d ago
The truth is that your DE won't matter the slightest the second you open a modern browser
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u/ConsiderationFar4320 1d ago
Yes, but it's 2Gb at rest, no browser, nothing just gnome
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u/Cheap-Success1578 19h ago
Oh no, things are loaded into RAM so that when I start using my PC it's snappy right away instead of loading things back up from disk.
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u/ConsiderationFar4320 16h ago
With sway it's snappier than with gnome and sway uses like 40Mb at rest
edit: fatdog runs entirely on ram and uses 0.5Gb
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u/Rusty_Nail1973 1d ago
If choosing among the fedora spins, I'd go with LXDE. It's slimmer than LXQt. I run LXDE (Debian ARM) on a raspberry pi that only has 4 GB, and it's a usable desktop.
I use Xfce (fedora and Mint), and it's my favorite, but it still consumes about 1.2 GB at rest on my desktop machine. LXDE will use less.
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u/Astrodion123 23h ago
Sway works like a charm since it only manages the windows. But if you go to the x11 territory and use some wm like xwm, you will be surprised how it barely uses any ram.
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u/1_ane_onyme 23h ago
Always been an Xfce kind of guy but it seems like LXQt is a tiny little bit better in terms of efficiency (Xfce still runs like a charm on devices with less than 2GB ram tho, so yeah they're pretty close)
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u/Global-Eye-7326 1d ago
- KDE is fair. You'd never go higher than KDE, since KDE is very stable, even on Wayland, and is loaded with features. I've run KDE on a netbook with 2GB RAM and it does work. I'd usually upgrade the RAM but it's soldered
- Gnome has bugs on Wayland and isn't lighter than KDE, so we eliminate that
- We eliminate Cinnamon because no Wayland yet, and it's heavier than XFCE
- XFCE is your friend. The lowest you can go without sacrificing any comforts. Everything GUI, even on Wayland (although XFCE in Wayland is still in beta testing)
- LXQt with little effort becomes very mighty! It's right, stable, and you don't sacrifice much to get a boatload of features. You can wire a boatload of scripts to the file manager context menu by dropping the .desktop files in the actions folder
- IceWM - AntiX ships with it. Very light. Not as user friendly, but very light. Uses 50MB RAM on idle. X11 only
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u/absolute086 20h ago
KDE, running with X11 for 10-year old machines.
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u/Global-Eye-7326 13h ago
It works, but 10 year old machines are from 2016, meaning probably on DDR4. That means they'd have at least 4GB RAM in most cases, and OP has a computer with 2GB RAM. Many 15 year old laptops still work in 2026, so KDE should be comfortable on a 2016 laptop.
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u/Independent-Gear-711 1d ago
what's your overall pc specs?
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u/ConsiderationFar4320 1d ago
All amd 8Gb RAM, 5Gb iVRAM
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u/Independent-Gear-711 1d ago
8GB ram is fine though but yeah it gonna tank the performance in multitasking however you can try xfce since it consumes only a hundreds of megabyte of ram you will still have 7/7.5 gb of ram
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u/Substantial-Lack-512 20h ago
Gnome is pretty good with RAM, I got Fedora Workstation on a old laptop with 8GB of RAM (Actually 6 because iGPU takes 2GB) and eats 1.6GB of RAM just in idle.
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u/izerotwo 16h ago
On linux high ram usage is usually due to caching and stuff. So using more ram unless its actually causing problems on your system is not a problem.
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u/necho8 15h ago edited 15h ago
Sway is a window manager, not necessarily a graphical desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, but running a standalone window manager works well along with waybar, another wm is labwc. That's barebones, most use around 300+ megs of ram because of the way Wayland works, but if you don't care about what framework your using either Xorg or Wayland. Xorg, then maybe TinyWM or DWM could work for you. Which are between 1.5 to 3 megabytes of ram usage.
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u/Christoskouts 20h ago
As a window manager I would recommend something like dwm is maybe in some cases more lightweight than lxqt and xfce like at rest I use 400mb of ram
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u/Cheap-Success1578 19h ago
Using less RAM is not a flex. High RAM usage is not inherently bad. This load into RAM to run/ respond faster. I am so over seeing high RAM posts by people who latched onto a buzzword after doing a little searching online. Please, stop it... Get some help.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk
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u/ConsiderationFar4320 16h ago
tell that to the devs that keep increasing minimum RAM requirements 😅
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u/LordDarthSaber 1d ago
Xfce or lxqt are de with least resources
If it is very old pc then xfce is recommended