Hi everyone,
This post is about Linux Mint MATE and XFCE, specifically about which is faster and uses less RAM. This is done on request by someone who watched my Linux Mint 19 MATE Review video from three months ago. Go here to see the post associated with that video. This will probably be a fairly short post, because most of the detail is in the video.
NOTE: See my new post on Mint 19.3 here.
Introduction
For my tests, I used a couple of VMs on my laptop, giving each of them 1GB of RAM, and 1 of my slow CPU cores. This was done on the laptop to accentuate any differences in speed between the two versions. I did this over VNC to avoid putting any extra load on the laptop and slowing it down. I also made sure to only open each app once, so there was no caching to create misleading results.
The Video
Summary
I expected the MATE version to be almost universally slower, because my previous experience comparing GNOME 2 and XFCE on old computers was that XFCE was way faster. However, that was on a Pentium 3-based system, and on Ubuntu 10.04, which is now 8 years old :). Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was wrong, except that MATE took a LOT longer to boot up. Perhaps the MATE version starts more services by default. I suspect the reason is that MATE uses 3D acceleration more than XFCE (I think), and this laptop might not handle that particularly well.
I was pleasantly surprised by how fast MATE was, so the conclusion I come to here is that there has been a lot of optimizing code since the original fork from GNOME 2. Unfortunately, some of the GNOME 2 bugs still seem to be around. For example, I still can’t change the mouse cursor colour consistently – it sometimes changes in certain apps, or won’t change at all. 🙁 I guess you can’t win them all. I really do like that redglass pointer though.
At any rate, that’s it from me for now, but I have quite a lot of different posts coming up soon, so stay tuned!
Hamish
Thanks for the hard workds, really apreciate
Ok, i will use xfce then, i need fast startup :). Thanks!
This comparison was just what I was looking for. Thanks! ?
I’m glad you found it useful 🙂
Thank you for this. Very thorough investigation and very good work. I am writing this on a 2011 notebook running Mint 20 Mate. I just use it as it is really portable and i use it like a tablet really. I was wondering if I could get a bit of speed improvement by using XFCE but you have saved me the effort. I will stick to Mate.
Glad to be of use 🙂
gg I appreciate the effort
Thanks 🙂