this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
529 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
83406 readers
3512 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, I suspect the main issue here is Gnome.
Despite their insistence on 'simplicity' and 'elegance', Gnome is by far the most resource-hungry DE that exists in the Linux ecosystem.
That, and maybe snap packages. It can't be good for RAM usage to have every app trying to load its own independent system of dependencies. That's got to lead to a lot of duplication in dependencies loaded into RAM.
Someone else in another comment linked to a memory comparison between desktop environments, and there KDE Plasma used the most memory, with GNOME in second place, but I think that the broader point here is that on Windows, you have one basic graphical shell that basically all desktop users are expected to have running. It's not completely impossible to hack up a Windows environment to avoid doing so, but it's a highly nonstandard configuration, and stuff is going to break.
Linux has a much broader range of options available, and those are first-class citizens. Some of them are considerably lighter on resource usage than others.
A lot of users aren't going to cobble together their own ideal environment the way I do, but there are "presets" of packages that are aimed specifically at being light on resource usage. XFCE has historically been one example; they were slow to move to Wayland, but it looks like they're doing it now. One doesn't have the sort of "the OS vendor is giving you one monolithic blob that you need to run" the way you do on Windows.