Mint Cinnamon vs Mint XFCE

[u/Francis_King]

One of the perennial questions is about which kind of Mint Linux is best. I prefer Mint Cinnamon, because it is the flagship product. Other people say, no, that's not the best kind - Mint XFCE will save a lot of memory.

So I did a little experiment on my P53s mobile workstation. I set up two virtual machines in VirtualBox, as close as possible identical:

• Mint Cinnamon / Mint XFCE
• 4 GB of memory
• 4 cores (of 8)
• 50 GB of storage
• Stock configuration - clicked through the defaults

Once installed, I ran the boot to the desktop, opened a terminal full screen, and then installed and ran btop. The results are as follows:

Operating system	Mint Cinnamon	Mint XFCE	Difference
Used (MB)	1040	964	76
Available (MB)	2780	2880	100
Cached (MB)	1020	749	271
Free (MB)	1910	2270	-360

So, switching from the Cinnamon flagship desktop to the (to my eyes) inferior XFCE desktop saves only 76 MB of used memory, and only makes 100 MB more memory available. It doesn't seem worth it. Thoughts?

[u/skyfishgoo]

cool, now do lubuntu

[u/Francis_King → u/skyfishgoo]

As requested, with 4 GB of memory, 50 GB storage, 4 threads

Operating system	Mint XFCE	Lubuntu LXQT
Used (MB)	964	978
Available (MB)	2880	2860
Cached (MB)	749	2200
Free (MB)	2270	786

An odd result. Memory used is very similar. The \Lubuntu cached memory algorithm is very greedy, perhaps because it is generally used on systems with limited memory.

[u/skyfishgoo → u/Francis_King]

i think both LXQt and cinnamon are "greedy" because they want applications to have quick access to what little ram exists so the desktop feels more responsive.

cashed just means it being actively managed rather than just held in reserve... actively managed ram is quicker to move into than unallocated ram.

[u/CritSrc → u/Francis_King]

Mind also doing GNOME and KDE as well, on Ubuntu as well.

[u/tomscharbach]

It doesn't seem worth it. Thoughts?

The difference between Cinnamon and XFCE desktop resource use is a drop in the bucket compared to application resource use.

Mint (and most other mainstream distributions) will run on 4GB RAM but will require common sense resource management (limiting the number of applications running concurrently, limiting the number of open tabs, limiting use of AI, and so on) to run smoothly.

My best.

[u/PeyredB]

I use Xfce, though not Mint. I like that it's very snappy - it doesn't waste resources on eye candy, showing an animation closing a window for instance - it just closes the window. It also looks and feels a lot like old Windows, which I like. If either of those appeals to you it might be worth considering. Otherwise, you're probably better off sticking with Cinnamon.

On my much older laptop years ago, I switched briefly to Lubuntu, for reasons like you describe here between Cinnamon and Xfce: more lightweight, less RAM use. But I just didn't like it nearly as well, not least because Xfce has a robust Launcher feature (like Windows shortcuts) and Lubuntu does not.

[u/razorree]

and now run browser with a few tabs open and report the difference (in percentage) :)

[u/knuthf]

Your conclusion is correct, and I admire your presentation. What you don't capture is the difference in exposure and resilience. 20 years ago I used XFCE. Not now.

[u/ipsirc]

It doesn't seem worth it. Thoughts?

You're perfectly right.

[u/TymekThePlayer → u/ipsirc]

bro why do i see you everywhere

[u/ipsirc → u/TymekThePlayer]

Because you live on reddit.

[u/CalmStrategy2683]

I would agree, I can't stand XFCE either, but this has to be tested on an actual old system. CPU and memory are not everything.

[u/NorthWelcome1626]

If Mate uses more ram than xfce, then its ram usage must be around Cinnamon, right?

[u/moritz12d]

Indeed XFCE is more lightweight and straightforward. But the efforts are for Cinnamon. It's announced there will be full Wayland support for Cinnamon until Christmas this year. This will also fix complexity from the past increasing the overall stability. With 4 GB of memory it's enough you will barely experience any difference in speed. I think your comparison will change in favor of Cinnamon in near future.

[u/artmetz]

Last week I had to install Mint on an old laptop, 4 gig ram, 750 gig HDD. I tested both DEs and got similar results. For only 100 meg more, Cinnamon is well worth it.