Speed Comparison of Four Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop Environments      
For a couple of years, I had Linux Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on my old Samsung laptop. To be honest, I was more than satisfied with it. At some point, I was offered an upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and I took the offer. But what happened next was not what I expected. I don’t know if I’m right or not but it seems that version 18.04 needed a bit more than my laptop could offer. It’s a Samsung laptop with 4GB of RAM and AMD A6-4400M APU with Radeon (tm) HD Graphics × 2. The hard drive is 500GB of HDD. Gnome desktop was lagging and I started to think if I made a mistake or not by upgrading to 18.04. But I didn’t want to give up on 19.04 so easily. So I installed a lightweight desktop environment to test out if my old Samsung could handle the new 18.04. Testing 18.04 Gnome, Unity, Lubuntu and LXDE desktop environmentsSo I made a simple set of test to go by with each of them. I wanted to test everyday situations in all of the environments to see if there is a big difference or not. The test was the following:
All the test were taken 3 times just to see if there were big differences within the environment. Time from login to fully loading the desktopThe fastest time for the desktop environment to load up was using LXDE. The best I could get was 5 seconds from pushing the login button. The slowest was Unity with 38 seconds.
Loading time of launching InkscapeThe fastest environment to start vector illustration software Inkscape was LXDE with 3,5 seconds. The slowest was Gnome with 37 seconds.
Loading time of launching BlenderI was hoping that Blender would open quickly as I’m using it almost every day. And it did, again, with LXDE. The shortest time was 2 seconds. For gnome, it took the longest to open the program with the time of 28 seconds.
Render time of test project in BlenderRender times were not that different but again LXDE and Lubuntu had it faster.
Loading time of launching Mozilla Firefox BrowserOpening the Firefox browser was a big disappointment. The fastest I got was 6 seconds with LXDE. But the longest was staggering 1 minute and 50 seconds with Gnome desktop.
Memory usage after closing the applicationsMemory usage was between 22 and 91% with LXDE and Lubuntu being the lightest and with Unity being the heaviest.
Last update: 2018-10-16 (Y,M,D) Read similar posts2018-10-17 First time setting up a laptop capable of booting multiple Linux distributions 2018-10-16 Linux Apps that I’m Using the Most in 2018 2018-10-16 Speed Comparison of Four Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop Environments 2017-03-06 How to clean folders using Linux 2017-03-06 My Top10 free Linux programs |
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