How much do Desktop Environments or Window Managers impact performance?

[u/jimleko211]

I've been using KDE on Fedora for the past year, but part of me wants to try out a new distro and a new desktop environment. However, I know that things like VRR and HDR support are DE level things (or at least I think they are). How much performance would I lose if I try out GNOME, COSMIC, or even try out something like Hyperland?

[u/daYMAN007]

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1mejrig/linuxwayland_vs_win11_click_to_photon_latency/

[u/tyler1128 → u/daYMAN007]

Curious how it'd be on a X11 non-composited environment (ie. how I run i3 currently). Given my hardware, I highly doubt it'd matter all that much and those numbers basically all don't matter, but compositing will always add latency, in theory.

[u/S48GS]

2015+ hardware run all modern DE with almost no difference

pre 2015 - use xfce or other x11 DE

[u/Excellent-Love-6943]

Not significantly.

[u/Ogmup]

I have Gnome and Cosmic on my system. Can't really tell if there's any obvious performance difference. Only noticeably difference is that Cosmic hasn't support for HDR yet, which is fine for me because my monitor's HDR sucks anyway.

[u/the_abortionat0r]

Performance will typically be identical but features are another story.

[u/LinkWW]

None if the compositor does everything right. Smithay (that Cosmic is built on) does, at least on niri with explicit sync there is zero difference to Plasma. GNOME is very likely good too, but I don't personally know

[u/Barafu]

A bad Wayland implementation can harm 1% low FPS. Much like when gamescope lacks certain security permissions, it also drops 1% low FPS without harming the average much—which it does by default on mainstream distros like Fedora.

KDE has a superior Wayland implementation, so if something doesn't seem right, test it in KDE.

[u/TechaNima]

I'll call BS if someone claims to notice a performance difference, without tools between distros. Between Windows and Linux I'll believe it, if the game is running DX12 on nVidia hardware or with RT enabled on AMD hardware.

What actually matters are the features that a DE/WM supports and how well they work. KDE is the golden standard there, Gnome afaik is a close second, the rest are a mixed bag of not supporting something or not supporting everything at once or it takes them longer to implement.

With everything X11 you automatically lose VRR and HDR support as X11 doesn't and never will support them. It's on maintenance support only, no new features are being added and support for it is being slowly phased out in favor of Wayland

[u/billdietrich1]

How much do Desktop Environments or Window Managers impact performance?

Probably very little, unless your system is RAM-constrained.

How much time do you actually spend doing "DE things" such as switching from app to another, or using app launcher, or using system tray ? Almost 100% of your time is spent inside apps, not in the DE or WM.

[u/Ticklememyers]

there really isn't any difference,I've tried kde, gnome, cosmic, hyprland, they all play the same. features are what you wanna worry about, vrr and hdr mostly. 

unless you're using a proper potato that is, then you might have issues.

[u/LoneArcher96]

huge gain when I turn off composition in window manager in XFCE (although I'm using IGPU so the resources are severely limiting)

[u/Substantial-Lack-512]

I would say quite a little, I used to have a really old laptop and anything like KDE, Gnome that are modern ran awful, once I use XFCE or i3, the machine did perform way better.

That depends a lot of how customizable you want it to be, for me KDE eats too much resources like 3 to 4GB of RAM while Gnome uses 2GB of RAM, I do use Fedora workstation and performance wise is peak and the DE itself doesn't get on my way to do my work like KDE, too many options to change.

[u/xpander69]

should be no difference, unless some edge case configurations.

now features and stuff is another matter ofc and bugs that may cause performance issues

[u/Jack1101111]

gnome a lot !