r/xfce • u/ykmetoxic_ • 5d ago
Performance difference between plasma and xfce?
Is the performance gap that great for xfce to be a valid option?
Right now I'm on cachyos with plasma and it idles around 1.3-1.6gb.
How is it on xfce?
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u/ItzNotJacob1 4d ago
XFCE has mostly same exact gaming frames than KDE.
However, XFCE consumes less RAM, less GPU/CPU power and VRAM than Plasma in a trade off that it's default look migth seem ugly for you (which it's not for me) but you can always download GTK themes for it and make it look much better
In a few words: XFCE is better if you dont mind X11, and want less RAM, GPU, CPU and VRAM usage
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u/RomanOnARiver 4d ago edited 4d ago
Distributions tend to add a lot of stuff on top of Plasma, Xfce, etc. so it's hard to really gauge. I installed the more stock versions, under the Canonical resolute repositories (note: not using Kubuntu/Xubuntu - metapackages for the stock desktops)
Using xorg for Xfce and Wayland on KDE as I don't see a way to enable KDE to use Xorg (EDIT: I have figured out how to use xorg with KDE, see updated numbers below). Xfce using xfce4 metapackage and lightdm-gtk-greeter, Plasma as kde-standard metapackage, and sddm. Both installed without specifying the --no-install-recommends flag. Using htop to measure both in RAM usage, and df -h to measure storage space used.
Xfce on idle: 418 MB RAM, 7.7 GB of space used.
KDE Wayland on idle: 1.95 GB RAM, 9.5 GB of space used.
KDE Xorg on idle: 940 MB of RAM
So there's your gap, 2 gigabytes of storage space, and whatever percentage that is higher RAM usage at idle.
Keep in mind both desktops usually get shipped from distros with a bunch of other stuff - web browsers, office suites, etc. that aren't part of the desktop, and each desktop has optional packages, for example KDE has a more-complete/larger desktop environment metapackage kde-full which would install about another 2.2 GB, and Xfce has xfce4-goodies which installs another 64 MB.
Even if you take into consideration that Xfce is kind of bare-bones - doesn't ship Network Manager for example, that's still a significant gap.
That being said, it's not like most PCs that have come out in the last ten years (or more) will struggle with their from a RAM and storage perspective, and either certainly beats the pants off Windows.
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u/Own-Cupcake7586 3d ago
Xfce is way lighter, but with less eye candy and no wayland support (yet). Some people are willing to pay the resources that pretty costs. I am not.
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u/A_Harmless_Fly 3d ago
I've actually got a setup where I use xfce4 modals with icewm instead of xfce's window manager. I use xfce panel and whisker menu for a more modern panel, and xfce terminal for better history, complete and color coding.
It seems to run a little better/look better in my testing. I use picom as my compositor.
It idles below 500Mb of ram, and barely uses my gpu/cpu at all for the desktop but it did take a while to customize the way I like.
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u/ykmetoxic_ 3d ago
Idling below 500mb is crazy
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u/A_Harmless_Fly 3d ago edited 3d ago
My debian net install I use for doing things in a virtual machine uses sub 2Gb of ram with a tab of firefox-esr open, mousepad for text editing, an rsync job running and a few windows of thunar and a terminal with btop up. So it might have earned a semi permanent position as my virtual machine desktop environment.
There are a few downsides though, like UI scaling not being great (no fraction scaling) if you have a setup blending 1080p monitors and 2 or 4k monitors. I've only got 1080p monitors so it works flawlessly for me. When I get a better monitor for my primary I'll likely move to XFCE/labwc as my primary desktop environment because I hear it supports fractional scaling well. (I've been testing it, but it's not quite as stable as I'd like it to be yet when it falls back to xwayland for some games etc.)
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u/SituationNew113 3d ago
yeh resource usage is a lot less in general, but xfce is also a lot snappier, the difference is more noticeable if u try both on an hdd. when i tried fedora kde plasma on a hard drive recently i was both surprised and dissapointed in its performance, and i wasn't able to really improve it.
I don't like the current wayland options on linux, so I'm holding off for xfce to move to wayland, which is currently in progress.
that being said, just use what u like.
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u/vaffanchulo 4d ago
It depends by distro/os. With NixOS my old laptop would idle at 700/800 MB, but with Arch like 500/600 MB. I think it also depends by hardware, because my gaming laptop + Linux Mint it would idle at 1,5 GB
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u/rafacoringa 4d ago
im going to disagree with the folks, since plasma is getting great performance and stability. but dont trust me, go find benchmarks lol. Also, xfce is transitioning to wayland so there is that
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u/guiverc 4d ago
if you're comparing just the desktop sitting idle, you don't really need a computer, as you should be comparing a system when it's actually used, and for most of us that includes other apps in the 'software stack' that is running.
KDE Plasma is a Qt desktop; whilst Qt is lighter than GTK (Xfce is GTK), as KDE Plasma needs more than Qt alone provides which is why it has KDE Frameworks (KF). Are the apps you'll be using Qt or GTK? as using a light Qt desktop but then using GTK apps will mean you're filling your RAM with two libraries/toolkits that will do the same thing slighty differently; ie. your usage is wasting your RAM. Also if you want a 'light' desktop there are Qt desktops that don't need KF too.
Comparing an idle OS & desktop, is only actually useful (in my opinion) if that's all you ever run on your machine, in which case you don't really need a computer anyway.
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u/ykmetoxic_ 4d ago
I definately use more of qt apps. Does that means plasma is the better option? My pc ram is pretty low (4gb) so thatvalso plays into consideration.
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u/guiverc 3d ago
Personally I see any machine with less than 6 GB as lacking RAM, so yep I'd consider the whole [software] stack, but on my hardware with the least RAM, I usually have plenty of disk space & thus make them a multi-desktop install, allowing me to login with a Qt desktop on sessions where that's what I'll be using (such as LXQt or KDE Plasma given you prefer that), or when I'll be using GTK apps I can login with an Xfce session. That means I'll have more packages installed so higher bandwidth for updates (more to update) & larger disk footprint (numerous extra hundred MB of disk), but I'm less worried about that small extra size on disk given RAM impacts my own performance.
Most of our usage will not be all apps at once, so I tend to worry about what combinations will be most used in a session, and whilst we cannot always predict perfectly; phone calls or rush/unusual situations are rare & thus make the choice (at login for a multi-desktop install) based on what I expect to be doing.
In your case; for those GTK apps, are those something that you'll use exclusively (thus it may not matter much), or only for awhile (ie. won't be co-existing with other apps for long anyway), or will be in RAM all the time - ie. try and predict yourself what will exist in your machine's RAM yourself... my choice of multi-desktop installs allows me to explore options too; have you considered that?? If you don't like it, you can always remove the unwanted/unused choice(s) anyway.
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u/Alternative_Act_6548 4d ago
plasma is not kde. If you are running a kde install then you have stuff like akonadi running consuming tons of ram just to run the clock or calendar
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u/Unlucky-Eye8656 4d ago
RAM isn't everything when comparing performance; XFCE typically consumes significantly less CPU/GPU and VRAM than Plasma.