Linus ditches KDE and Gnome for Xfce

[Detonate]

Very interesting. I'm thinking about going back to XFCE myself,

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/...-gnome-so-what

[GreyGeek]

Re: Linus ditches KDE and Gnome for Xfce

I can understand Linus going to Xfce. He does most of his work with email and git, and I've read that most of that work is done on the command line. Being much lighter there is less CPU overhead with Xfce and Lxde than with Gnome3 or KDE4, so the command line goes much faster. Those two light desktops are for underpowered machines and, IMO, represent a great leap back to the desktop before 2000.

If you really want speed drop to the command line and console applications, but be prepared to lose all that interaction and ease that KDE4 brings to the table ...

EDIT: I got curious and opened Synaptic. I checked every xfxe4 application except the "notify" app, because it wanted to install a lot of Gnome and KDE4 stuff. The total app count was 99, which took 104 Mb. These include the battery monitor plugin, the cdrom plugin, the removable device plugin, etc... IOW, every plugin that would make Xfce as responsive and interactive as KDE4 is.

Pharonix did a memory footprint comparison for KDE, Gnome, Lxde and Xfce. At 600Kb KDE4 uses twice as much memory as Lxde. Gnome2 and Xfce4 come in at about 450Kb.