d3Xt3r , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I'm speaking relatively, in terms of an old PC with limited RAM and slow storage.

Here's an example of two identical VMs with 2GB RAM, one installed with Fedora 40 KDE, and another with Fedora 40 LXQt, both set to use X11 (because LXQt isn’t Wayland ready yet), both updated and running the latest kernel 6.8.10-300.fc40. I logged into the DEs, opened only two terminal windows and nothing else, ran, and ran htop.

https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/e78854f8-9c96-4f07-a47a-021f47ae33aa.png

Also, check out the memory consumption listed by a user in this post: https://lemmy.nz/comment/9070317

Edit: Here's a screenshot of the top 30 processes on my test systems, side-by-side:

https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/64771be2-2156-43b2-8287-e977f6dcb747.png

Of the above, I calculated the usage of the top 10 processes specific to each respective DE, and you can see that KDE's memory usage is almost double that of LXQt. Had I counted all the DE-specific processes, it'd no doubt be a lot more than double.