Power & Memory Usage Of GNOME, KDE, LXDE & Xfce

“Xfce, LXDE, and other desktop environments are often referenced
as being lighter-eight Linux desktop environments than KDE and
GNOME, but what are the measurable performance differences between
them? Curious how much of a quantitative impact the GNOME, KDE,
Xfce, and LXDE desktops have on netbook systems, we carried out a
small set of tests to look at the differences in memory usage,
battery power consumption, and thermal performance.

“While the Phoronix Test Suite is most often used by us and
others to carry out direct performance benchmarks or other tests
using the different test suites and profiles, the open-source
testing platform of ours also has an advanced sensor monitoring
framework with logging capabilities. The Phoronix Test Suite
through the underlying Phodevi (Phoronix Device Interface) library
is able to monitor various system vitals ranging from hardware
sensors like the CPU temperature, system temperature, and battery
power consumption to software values like the CPU and GPU
utilization, IOwait, disk read/write speeds, and memory usage. In
fact, all of these metrics can be monitored while the Phoronix Test
Suite is running any of the standard tests/suites. To monitor all
of the hardware and software sensors while running say the Nexuiz
game benchmark, simply run MONITOR=all phoronix-test-suite
benchmark nexuiz and the system_monitor module that provides this
functionality will be initialized through the MONITOR environmental
variable. You can also get creative and use MONITOR=all
phoronix-test-suite run idle or MONITOR=all phoronix-test-suite run
battery-power-usage, as we did for the test results in this
article.”

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