Speed and efficiency

Resources on a Pi are never sky high, so it’s important that a distro be efficient.

Raspberry Pi OS was the lightest of the five distributions on test in this month’s Roundup. It took 29 seconds to boot into the desktop. At this point, we opened a terminal and typed code free -h , which showed that 266MB was in use. We then launched Chromium and browsed to the Linux Format (which is a somewhat feature-free) website. At this point 485MB was in use. Overall, that’s pretty impressive.

Twister OS offers similar characteristics to its parent OS, Raspberry Pi OS. Booting to the desktop took 33 seconds, and at that point, 304MB was in use, and this climbed to 436MB when the included Chromium browser was navigated to the site, a similar overall outcome to Raspberry Pi OS.

Performing the same test on Manjaro gave a power-on-todesktop time of 43 seconds with 539MB in use. By the time we had pointed Firefox to the Linux Format site 919MB was in use. This still left a lot of memory free on a 4GB machine.

Ubuntu uses 698MB on a fresh boot, and it took 52 seconds to get there. That’s not bad when you consider how similar this edition is to regular desktop Ubuntu. This increases to 1.1GB in use when Firefox is pointed at our site. Booting into the Pop!_OS desktop took 71 seconds and showed 748MB in use before any applications were loaded. Loading up Firefox navigation to the Linux Format website took that to 1.3GB used, which was more than two and a half times as much as Raspberry Pi OS.

It’s super-subjective, but we felt that Pop!_OS and Ubuntu were a bit slower in use than Twister OS and Raspberry Pi OS. Manjaro was in the middle.