Performance

Do they actually perform better than the fully fledged defaults?

VERDICT

It’s very difficult to measure performance in terms of absolute numbers due to a lot of factors. Since we can’t separate the desktop environment from the apps, we can’t really measure their exact draw on resources. This means the consumption will vary from machine to machine and may go up or down depending on the number of installed apps.

Also, there is no one single point of measurement. For instance, an environment could be blazingly fast to load, but its resource consumption could be really high while it’s supposedly idle because of the fact that it’s prefetching or loading components in the background.

On our test machine, EDE idles at about 150MB. The figures go up when an app is launched, but quickly drop back when you close the app. On a related note, it’s fairly quick at launching apps, with Libreoffice timed at 4.3 seconds.

Then there’s Lumina, which isn’t designed for Linux – and that’s probably why its startup takes about three times longer than EDE. It idles at around 210MB, but app launch times are only

slightly slower than EDE. Its memory consumption also mirrors EDE, with highs recorded at the initial launch of apps. Moksha is just as lightweight as EDE but its startup times and app launches are noticeably faster. While LXQT does take slightly longer to bring up the desktop, its app launch times are on par with Moksha.

Openbox is blazingly faster than the others. The startup time for the window manager depends on the number of elements it has to load. Once it’s loaded, app launches are among the fastest of the lot.

Equinox DESKTOP Lumina Lxqt 8/10 8/10 8/10 moksha DESKTOP Openbox 9/10 9/10 There’s a reason why the desktops featured in this Roundup are considered lightweight, and it’s not because of the disk space they require.