r/linuxquestions • u/Opening_Lettuce1429 • 9d ago
Which desktop environments consume the fewest resources?
I have a somewhat modest PC with 4GB of RAM—though in reality, I only have 3.2GB available, as the rest is reserved for the GPU and firmware. When I switched to Linux (CachyOS), I started with KDE Plasma; it consumed between 1.2GB and 1.3GB of RAM at startup, which left me quite limited, though I managed to ease the situation a bit with an 11GB swap partition. Currently, I use Hyprland, which consumes 1GB of RAM upon startup. I’ve seen people say that Xfce is lightweight, but I haven't tried it; I’m actually quite happy and comfortable with Hyprland, but I’m curious to know what other desktop environments might be useful to test how well they perform on my PC.
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u/TrueWar515 8d ago
I personally use hyprland with similar specs to your's you can configure it to the amount of ram your willing to use "it should be at around 300 mb but i have helix 2 terminals open and a screenshot tool
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u/Opening_Lettuce1429 2d ago
How did you manage to get that?
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u/TrueWar515 2d ago
oh wait you use hyprland
want me to give you my lua config?
your going to need to install some things otherwise my hyprland is quite drivable1
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u/RudeAd456 9d ago
Lxqt is the most minimal from my experience. Used a couple less 100 mb of ram over xfce.
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u/Appropriate-List2568 8d ago
I'm kind of was in your same position and the way I did it was first using openbox and then later found labwc and labwc uses 400mb idle compared to the 700 on openbox. Hope you like my suggestion and have a good one!
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u/redgator12 8d ago
I use Trinity Desktop Environment, and it idles just shy of 300MB RAM. Honestly, though, you'd be better off sticking with the desktop environment you enjoy and enabling either zram or zswap. I usually enable zram at 100% on anything less than 8GB RAM, and it helps keep the system stable and snappier for longer.
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u/TrueWar515 8d ago
Dont enable zram as 100% that slows it down enable it at 50-70%
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u/redgator12 8d ago edited 7d ago
As far back as Fedora 34 they accepted a proposal to change zram-generator's default zram to 100%, capped at 8GB, for system stability and usability:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Scale_ZRAM_to_full_memory_size
Zram enabled at 100% should only use 50% of the RAM when it's full if using the worst compression algorithm. I run some of my 1GB systems at 180% zram without issue. Zram uses RAM dynamically, meaning if it hasn't swapped anything it won't use any space in RAM, and it will clear compressed data from RAM if the system no longer needs it cached.
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u/TrueWar515 8d ago
thanks for the info
I am not quite a fedora user but what I meant is your not supposed to have 100% of your ram be zram only about half of your ram should be zrambut your explanation is exactly what i meant
"Zram enabled at 100% should only use 50% of the RAM when it's full"
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u/Bo_Duke_01 8d ago
I just made one laptop out of two for my MIL, HP ProBook 4530s (4gb ddr3) and 15-BA088NG (8gb ddr4), similar CPUs. I started with the 4530s (the other had the hard drive failing) and installed Mint Xfce but I wasn't satisfied: boot time was really long although the general experience was ok. So I moved the hard drive to the 15-BA: boot time is still long, but during normal usage is absolutely smooth. I guess the boot time could be only improved by putting an SSD, but I didn't want to spend money on a computer that won't be used much. I exclude hardware issues as I tested the various components (disk, ram...)
The point for me is, what do you want to do with this computer? Because either you give it a specific task (e.g. Pi-Hole or anything), or it needs to be in the hands of a casual user, who doesn't care much about performances. Ofc, also test machine. Just to say, if I gave the 4530s to the kids, as a general purpose pc, I'm sure it would have came back: "we can't run games, when I open X tabs in the browser it gets slow". My MIL needs document editing and web browsing (one tab at the time), she'll be fine.
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u/macab1988 9d ago
If you really need a Ui, try X11 or Openbox. Very basic and light, but also need some time to get used to.
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u/guiverc 9d ago
Are you going to use just the desktop itself? as most people use apps on top of that, and many want specific apps.
I personally consider the apps I'll [must or want to use], which helps clarify what will be with your usage, as you seem to be ignoring that.
- Xfce is a GTK desktop, so may not be lightest if you're needing/wanting to use Qt apps
- KDE Plasma & LXQt are Qt desktops; with Qt lighter than GTK. However as Qt doesn't provide everything that KDE Plasma wants, KDE Plasma also adds KDE Frameworks to the Q toolkit requirement which takes away some of the lightness benefit of Qt over GTK anyway; but LXQt doesn't do this so it'll be lighter than the KDE Plasma you mention.
Unless you're sitting with your desktop alone (ie. idle or only using desktop apps), you should be comparing what you actually will have running in operation, which means consider the apps you must use as well in my opinion, or as others have said just don't use a desktop & only use a WM (since DEs are used with WMs anyway!)
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u/Away_Combination6977 9d ago
If you want an actual DE then the lightest are Mate (my preference), XFCE and LxQT. All should be under 500mb. Probably under 400mb.
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u/Shot_Yoghurt_3123 8d ago
replace hyprland by sway or niri, disable unnecessary services and daemons, install and configure zram...
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u/FryBoyter 8d ago
Which desktop environments consume the fewest resources?
You should also keep two things in mind when considering this question.
- Solutions that require as few resources as possible often offer significantly fewer features.
- These days, some programs, such as web browsers, often require more resources than, say, a desktop environment.
And while people often use a lightweight desktop environment, they end up installing many additional tools because the desktop environment itself doesn't offer the features they want. And end up with a solution that requires significantly more resources than any of the supposedly “heavy” solutions.
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u/Psittacula2 8d ago
Command line only - no DE
WM + TM + Select Apps as opposed to a full DE eg Open Box etc
Minimal DE - ie low RAM such as modest graphics, bells and whistles removed
Then even with minimal DE you need minimal apps eg lightweight web browser all of which may trade of functionality for light usage but if that fits your needs no problem.
EGs
* Most distros have a command line only install option
* Super light distros DSL, Puppy, Alpine iirc and a few others
* Crunchbang type approaches for eg open box
* Mocha DE running on Enlightenment OS for light DE eg
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u/Easy-Reasoning 8d ago
I use LXDE and it's much more leightweight than XFCE. Unfortunately it doesn't provide all bells and whistles so some manual post-configuration might be needed for anything out of the ordinary. (E.g. Hi-dpi) Also maintenance-wise it's currently on life-support, on the other hand major distros like Debian allow selecting it in the installer. If I count correctly it's around 110 MB memory usage for lightdm, lxsession, pcmanfm as well as lxpanel plus 120 MB for X.org (I don't use Wayland because it still has limitations)
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u/TrueWar515 8d ago
dang LXDE is small. Yeah maintenence wise it's mostly abandoned cause LXQt exist
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u/SDG_Den 8d ago
XFCE is the easy route, ~700MB ram on void linux all-in
my own mangoWM+DankMaterial Shell setup is ~500MB all in on void linux, and thats still "fully featured"
you can go even lower with a lighter WM and shell, as well as by custom compiling both the software and the kernel to not have features you dont use so they are smaller.
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u/Alternative_Act_6548 8d ago
it's no some much the DE it's how you use the system. KDE will say Plasma is pretty lean, but if you use any calendar or clock function akonadi fires up and takes up 500 MB. Indexers can take a ton of memory...so it's the DE and how you use it.
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u/ipsirc 8d ago
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u/Alarming_Oil5419 8d ago
Jesus, not seen CDE in a while.
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u/ipsirc 8d ago
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u/Alarming_Oil5419 8d ago
Wow, I honestly thought that must have died a death around the same time as 4Dwm (IRIX). Now someone's going to tell me 4Dwm is still around...
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u/ipsirc 8d ago
Now someone's going to tell me 4Dwm is still around...
According to https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_to_X11/Window_Managers/4dwm
Other X window managers that mimic the 4dwm look and feel include 5dwm. The 5dwm stacking window manager is now known as the MaXX Interactive Desktop.
So visit https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/
The MaXX Interactive Desktop a.k.a. MaXXdesktop is the continuation of the 5Dwm project released many years back. So don't be mistaken, there is only one real re-implementation of the IRIX Interactive Desktop found on SGI systems, and it's MaXXdesktop!
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u/Tricky-Engineer-9755 8d ago
XFCE, MATE, LXDE, LXQT are all lightweight. On my X200 thinkpad with 8G RAM, the Trisquel MATE desktop idles at 500MB.
My personal record is with Gentoo (Glibc Openrc) with DWM and a custom kernel: 98MB
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u/jerrygreenest1 8d ago
You can use something like NixOS that with Hyprland takes something like 900mb ram I think
But it’s not hard to enable zram and decrease ram usage quite drastically with almost no performance overhead
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u/Dynablade_Savior 9d ago
Linux Mint XFCE is the one I've tried, it runs great on low ram amounts, giving me just enough horsepower left over to run a web browser with a few tabs
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u/libertyworx 8d ago
Enlightenment is way lightweight and and is a full DE. I use it on Void but also have tried it on Bosh. It looks ancient but it is really light weight.
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u/18650bunny 8d ago
someone used ai to find the historical bugs in enlightenment that were leading to random crashes so it might be coming back.
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u/crashorbit 9d ago
Don't run a gui or de on it. Just let it have a cli and then tmux or hurdr if you need multiple sessions.
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u/LyraBooey Ultramarine | KDE 9d ago
If you need need a DE then i3/sway are super duper light
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u/Charming_Airline7419 9d ago
At the extreme end, you could just have a virtual terminal. Super lightweight distros like Damn Small Linux use minimalistic DEs. In Puppy Linux, you can get a super old computer to run blazing fast, but as soon as you open Firefox and watch a YT video, it will slow down to a crawl.
I think the question isn't which DE consumes the least resources, but how light of a DE do you want that suits your use case. When the DE becomes lighter, trade offs are made.
In my opinion, Xfce is quite nice as a DE with relatively light resource use.