Pinderkent

Today I read an article comparing KDE and GNOME. It covers a number of criteria, including customization, configurability, ease-of-use, and dependability. But some major criteria I really didn't see much about were those of performance and memory usage.

Let me start off by saying that I have not performed any formal benchmarking of either GNOME nor KDE. I have never really bothered to peruse the source code of either system to any great extent. What I say comes directly from my experience as a user of various versions of both desktop environments.

I have found that KDE feels more responsive than GNOME, when used on the same system. KDE applications like the Konqueror web browser, the KMail mail client, and the Kate text editor feel snappy. On the other hand, GNOME applications like the Epiphany web browser, Balsa email client, and gedit text editor do not feel as quick, and in some cases feel slow or bloated.

One thing I found with GNOME was that the menus of most applications seemed slow to redraw. I'm not completely familiar with how GNOME deals with application menus. I don't know if most applications just use the menuing facilities provided by GTK+, or if GNOME offers some extensions to what GTK+ offers. In any case, with KDE applications, say Konqueror for instance, I can open the "Location" menu, and then move between the other menus rapidly, with the other menus being drawn immediately. Trying this on the same machine with GNOME's Epiphany results in noticeable redrawing times when moving between menus, even when revisiting a menu for the seventh or eighth time.

I really don't know why certain aspects of GNOME's performance and responsiveness are so much poorer than KDE's. I don't have the time or inclination to locate and fix the problems with GNOME or GTK+. Beyond raw performance, I think we need to consider the memory usage of each environment.

A Google search turned up some actual desktop environment memory usage benchmark data for a fairly recent study. This informal study compares KDE, GNOME, XFCE and WindowMaker in a variety of situations and configurations. For what appears to be the most real-world of all the scenarios, listed under the heading of "8. Desktop's applications" in the study, KDE was found to have the lowest memory consumption. In this particular test, KDE and some typical KDE applications were found to consume 143.2 MB of RAM. GNOME and comparable GNOME applications consumed 174.8 MB. XFCE and some third-party applications comparable to the ones used for GNOME and KDE consumed 206.8 MB of RAM.

My own personal experience would mirror those results. I do tend to think that KDE and its accompanying applications are lighter than the equivalents for GNOME. This may be due to the differing levels of integration between the two projects. As shown by its download page, KDE tends to be far more integrated than GNOME. Compare the list of KDE downloads to that of the latest version of GNOME's platform and sources downloads. Keep in mind that the GNOME downloads are listed twice for each application or library, due to both gzip and bzip2 being used to compress the archives. One notable thing is that most of libraries used by many KDE applications are bundled together in the kdelibs package, while many of the GNOME libraries are spread among multiple, separate packages.

From my own development experience, applications and libraries that tend to be more tightly developed together often include less code duplication. This may play a role in the memory usage differences between KDE and GNOME. Many of the individual GNOME libraries may include functionality offered by other, separate GNOME libraries. KDE, with its more integrated applications and support libraries, may better eliminate such duplication. It would be interesting if somebody with more time on their hands looked into this hypothesis.

While the performance and memory consumption of KDE and GNOME are not the only factors to consider when comparing the two desktop environments, I think they are pretty important and must be considered. From my own experience, even minor performance deficiencies or memory usage excesses can have a profound impact on usability. Even on systems with 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM, excessive memory usage can lead to swapping, which on many systems results in hugely degraded performance. And from my personal experience, I think KDE is perhaps better than GNOME in this respect. There is even some experimental data to back up these experience-based findings.