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from the less-suckage-than-the-last-time-around dept.
Xubuntu is a light-ish spin of Ubuntu Linux. It uses the Xfce desktop environment and is suitable for older machines which would bog down with a heavier DE like Unity or GNOME or KDE.
Curmudgeonly software reviewer Dedoimedo reports:
Giving a high score to Xubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak may look as if it's getting credit only because all other Ubuntu releases this year were horrible, but it is not so. If we exclude the hardware-specific issues with the Realtek drivers--which is a big issue across the entire distro world--and the package manager choice, there weren't any huge, cardinal problems this time. It would seem that Xubuntu is recovering gently. Perhaps it is still too early to tell, but Yak is much, much better than [Xubuntu 16.04 Xenial] Xerus. And it deserves 8/10.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday November 08 2016, @11:45PM
Has anyone here using an even lighter weight distro than Xubuntu found that there is much of a performance difference?
There's a massive difference in memory use depending on what you choose for your DE/WM. You can see the difference yourself by installing something like WindowMaker or a tiling WM (notion, i3, herbsluftwm, etc.). Just using notion instead of KDE4's kwin + plasma desktop (plus its unfortunate tendency to fire up akonadi) is something like 300-400mb memory difference, even with a lot of KDE's background services still running. The gap is even greater if I cherry-pick things to run instead of KDE's various services, but I get enough use out of the other components that I don't care. Of course, running Chrome or Firefox with just a few tabs will use more memory than either, but if you're memory-starved it's better to give it to applications you use rather than your window manager + dock/panel/whatever.
CPU-wise, it's mostly irrelevant because the programs you run are going to be the biggest consumers of cycles.
Or is it perhaps the X applications themselves that become the dominant factor (I'm looking at you, web browser)?
It's a bit of both, and it also depends a lot on what you do. Some things just use a lot of memory or processing power and there's not really any way around it. Applications that deal with images (Krita, gimp) will happily chew through all of your available memory because images, layers, undo stacks, brushes, etc. all take a lot of memory by design, because it's a memory-hungry job. In addition to memory use, 3d applications like Blender will also hog your CPU and GPU, and it's again by design. Trying to make them use less just makes things take longer, and the user's time is more important in these cases.
With stuff like that, using fewer resources on the things you don't care about translates to more efficiency with the stuff you do. So it might be worth it to try.
Of course, not everything is using resources efficiently. Browsers, like you mentioned, have gotten large because they've becomes operating systems in and of themselves. Chrome and Firefox both use custom UI toolkits that aren't shared with other applications and they rely heavily on JS for both the sites and the browser operation itself. They've gone the same route that emacs did, except even less efficiently. And now we're seeing a tendency for people to write "native" applications that are just a standalone browser + packaged Javascript, using frameworks like electron. It's a popular way to make cross-platform programs, and it's an inefficient mess. Know how I said the browser is basically an OS in itself? That means that every browser-based electron app (Atom, Light Table, many others) is yet another OS.
If you use a lot of that stuff what DE you choose won't matter unless you're incredibly resource-starved, because it's already an inefficient mess and your best bet is to just throw more hardware at it.
For the stuff in between those extremes it's unlikely to matter, because pretty much any system in the last ten years will be able to run even a full-fat DE plus normal applications without a problem.