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View Full Version : Which one is faster? GNOME or KDE?



Foxmike
May 18th, 2007, 04:01 AM
Okay, we all know tha XFCE and other lightweight DE are quite fast, so let's not talk about them here.

I am very curious about KDE vs GNOME in terms of speed. I know it is a sensitive subject, so let's keep cool!:)

I am not very techy, and I don't know the details of internal working of the 2 "big DEs". I would like your opinion, tho, about which one is the fastest one of the 2: Gnome and his C libraries or KDE with with it's C++ libraries (if that makes any difference, I don't know).

Regards,

-FM

yatt
May 18th, 2007, 04:05 AM
KDE loads slower, but is faster the rest of the time.

aysiu
May 18th, 2007, 04:16 AM
My answer: it depends.

fuscia
May 18th, 2007, 04:17 AM
i found kde faster, once i had a more powerful machine. both were too slow to care on my old desktop. that's why i use openbox on it, with apps like dillo.

gnomeuser
May 18th, 2007, 04:20 AM
I find GNOME much faster than KDE in my use cases.

iPirates
May 18th, 2007, 04:24 AM
gnome on older computers - but once you have a fast enough computer, they both seem to perform equally. i've tried both on my 2ghz duel processor, and they both seem to run just as fast.

Ptero-4
May 18th, 2007, 04:49 AM
Gnome is usually the faster of them.

Foxmike
May 18th, 2007, 04:55 AM
My answer: it depends.

On what might it depend?

Here's another post I did that gave me the idea of this poll:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2674677#post2674677

Maybe XFCE might be a better choice for me considering my system's specs, but I prefer a DE that has more to play with, that's why I'm looking towards Gnome or KDE.

Let's see in a situation where I would like to use basic day-to-day applications (e-mail, web browser, office apps, photo management/editing, mp3 playing/encoding), with some eye-candy, as a basic set-up of either Compiz or Beryl.

Would it depend on the theme engine? Icons(SVG vs PNG)? Eye-candy (of course, yes, but which one handles it better)? I know Gnome is very snappy when not using Compiz but I really like it.

Are KDE applications generally faster than Gnome ones (Not considering the DE itself)?


Regards,

-FM

yatt
May 18th, 2007, 04:57 AM
On what might it depend?

Here's another post I did that gave me the idea of this poll:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2674677#post2674677

Maybe XFCE might be a better choice for me considering my system's specs, but I prefer a DE that has more to play with, that's why I'm looking towards Gnome or KDE.

Let's see in a situation where I would like to use basic day-to-day applications (e-mail, web browser, office apps, photo management/editing, mp3 playing/encoding), with some eye-candy, as a basic set-up of either Compiz or Beryl.

Would it depend on the theme engine? Icons(SVG vs PNG)? Eye-candy (of course, yes, but which one handles it better)? I know Gnome is very snappy when not using Compiz but I really like it.

Are KDE applications generally faster than Gnome ones (Not considering the DE itself)?


Regards,

-FM
Konqueror loads faster on Gnome than nautilus does.

icecruncher
May 18th, 2007, 05:12 AM
Kde, saying this after having tried both gnomw and kde on my 333Mhz box

joe.turion64x2
May 18th, 2007, 05:21 AM
Right now I find GNOME faster than KDE, years ago (remember SUSE 9?) KDE was faster than GNOME, at least in my machine.

maagimies
May 18th, 2007, 05:47 AM
KDE, but definitely not Kubuntu's, not even when installing the kdecore route.
Anyway, changed to KDE for the first time in months as I've been using Gnome that time, and the change is refreshing.
No laggy redrawing when moving windows, and a general feeling of snappiness that I just can't point a finger on. Definitely not a placebo effect though, as with Kwin I can move windows very rapidly without the contents lagging behind, but with Metacity this is very noticiable.

karellen
May 18th, 2007, 06:55 AM
they feel pretty much the same in terms of speed to me

kragen
May 18th, 2007, 07:22 AM
Surely it's possible to do some tests here and get some actual figures - I would have a go myself but I don't have KDE installed. I'd be fairly interested to see a comparison of KDE and gnome for things like the enviroment startup time, the time to load various common applications etc...

WalmartSniperLX
May 18th, 2007, 07:28 AM
Depends on what services/processes you have going.

steven8
May 18th, 2007, 07:30 AM
When I've run KDE, I felt it was a bit slower, but I didn't care. I like the intuitive access KDE gave me to things.

Foxmike
May 18th, 2007, 07:32 PM
Well I have just installed KDE yesterday evening to compare. I must say that at first sight, it looks very snappy. I haven't had time to compare startup times, but it seems quite similar to Gnome.

As for apps, the first I tried is Digikam (because f-spot was a nightmare with Gnome) and it seems to handle the pictures previews very well. I must say that I have about 5k pictures loaded in the database. I know this might not be related to the DE, but I am curious about the effects of the DE's services on running apps. If KDE has more efficient services than Gnome, or not.

Any thoughts on this?

Regards,

-FM

theicyj
May 18th, 2007, 07:37 PM
I haven't noticed much of a difference regarding performance with either Gnome of KDE in my experiences.

aysiu
May 18th, 2007, 07:39 PM
On what might it depend?
View Poll Results: Which one is fastest? Gnome or KDE?
GNOME 25 64.10%
KDE 14 35.90%
Voters: 39.
View Poll Results: Do you use KDE or Gnome? (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=424586&highlight=kde+gnome)
KDE 76 22.42%
Gnome 222 65.49%
Both 41 12.09%
Voters: 339. You have already voted on this poll About 65% of forum members use Gnome and about 65% of forum members think Gnome is faster.

About 22% of forum members use KDE, but 35% think KDE is faster.

So I'd say it depends on whom you ask, what their biases are, whether or not they've actually timed anything or just "feel" something is faster, what you're comparing (applications launching, applications running, desktop loading, menu opening), what systems people have, and what implementations of KDE or Gnome they have installed.

GeneralZod
May 18th, 2007, 07:42 PM
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=930372&postcount=25

:)

heimo
May 18th, 2007, 07:43 PM
My subjectively biased personal honest opinion is that KDE "feels" faster - and I think I mean that window manager is or feels faster by default in KDE. So I voted KDE. But I don't have long time experience with that, as I mainly use Gnome.

EDIT: I'd also like to add that vim is better than emacs.

aysiu
May 18th, 2007, 07:48 PM
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=930372&postcount=25

:)

If KDE and GNOME do indeed have a difference in speed, it is dwarfed by the placebo effect and human bias Very succinctly put.

b0ng0
May 18th, 2007, 08:02 PM
After using both Kubuntu and Ubuntu I have to say I find Ubuntu faster (and my PC is quite good spec so it's not being bottlenecked). I just remember firefox having absolutely diabolical loading times in Kubuntu.

joe.turion64x2
May 19th, 2007, 03:15 AM
After using both Kubuntu and Ubuntu I have to say I find Ubuntu faster (and my PC is quite good spec so it's not being bottlenecked). I just remember firefox having absolutely diabolical loading times in Kubuntu.
If you want to see diabolic loading times in everything try PCLinuxOS, that is the exception to the rule I think, because although entirely KDE based it is faster than any given GNOME based (say Ubuntu) distro.

I am anxious to get their PCLinuxOS 2007 official release (available shortly).

Joe.

Foxmike
May 19th, 2007, 03:47 AM
About 65% of forum members use Gnome and about 65% of forum members think Gnome is faster.

About 22% of forum members use KDE, but 35% think KDE is faster.

So I'd say it depends on whom you ask, what their biases are, whether or not they've actually timed anything or just "feel" something is faster, what you're comparing (applications launching, applications running, desktop loading, menu opening), what systems people have, and what implementations of KDE or Gnome they have installed.

I agree with that, and you just brought good statistics here, thank you, aysiu!:)


http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=930372&postcount=25

:)

I tend (good word? I'm native francophone...) to agree with you on that. I tried back Gnome with no eye-candy (compiz) and kde alone they both seems quite crispy and snappy. But thats remains personal feeling and it is not backed by any technical arguments.

But I am very curious (I should have had mentionned it in the first post) about technical reasons to back those feelings, as some you gave in the post you linked


One thing that is demonstrably true, however, is that KDE apps tend to start up more slowly, mainly because of an extremely inefficient bit of font configuration which is needlessly performed for every app started up, and because the Linux library linker does not deal that well with C++. The former will be ameliorated by KDE4, and hopefully, by that time, GCC's -fvisibility=hidden flag will be ready for prime-time (I asked jriddell if Kubuntu uses it, and he said no, as GCC's implementation will be largely broken until GCC 4.2) which will mitigate the latter.

Thank you GeneralZod!:)

Regards,

-FM

Rhox
May 19th, 2007, 04:01 AM
EDIT: I'd also like to add that vim is better than emacs.

I'd like to say that was kinda weird. Also, I'd like to say that saying one text editor is better in every possible situation is pretty unintelligent (at least in terms of features, emacs has a lot on vim).

dspari1
May 19th, 2007, 04:04 AM
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=930372&postcount=25

:)


I don't know if my test is fair, but my Ubuntu live cd loads 20-30 seconds faster than my Kubuntu livecd. I tested it 5 times on several computers, and I kept on getting the same results; however, I do feel that once loaded, KDE runs faster. The later could be the placebo effect, but the former definitely isn't.

mills
May 19th, 2007, 04:12 AM
if one is faster than the other, how much faster can it be? seconds? nano seconds?
are you guys timing it or guessing?

you'll have to forgive my noobness here i've only ever used winxp and gnome

heimo
May 19th, 2007, 04:16 AM
I'd like to say that was kinda weird. Also, I'd like to say that one text editor is better in every possible situation is pretty unintelligent (at least in terms of features, emacs has a lot on vim).

There is a long tradition of one thing vs. another thing debates in computer history, of which vim vs. emacs is very well known example. If you took my "vim is best" note seriously, I should have added couple smileys after that to make sure my humorous (although not very clever) intent would be noted. Linux vs. Windows, monolithic vs. micro kernels, gnome vs. kde.

Foxmike
May 19th, 2007, 06:11 AM
There is a long tradition of one thing vs. another thing debates in computer history, of which vim vs. emacs is very well known example. If you took my "vim is best" note seriously, I should have added couple smileys after that to make sure my humorous (although not very clever) intent would be noted. Linux vs. Windows, monolithic vs. micro kernels, gnome vs. kde.

Well I know a bit about those arguments you are talking about, and this thread was not meant to start another one.:) I was actually looking for both opinions, or subjective feelings (that can not acutally be calculated), and also for a bit more technical cues about why would one be faster than the other (librareis, coded language, etc.).

nrs
May 19th, 2007, 08:20 AM
The poll is too simplistic.

Generally GTK+/GNOME applications seem to load faster, but on average it seems Qt/KDE applications seem to perform better once loaded.

There are certain things in GTK+ which seem much slower than their Qt counterparts at least superficially. Something that comes to mind is *GtkTreeView, whenever I encounter it with a large amount of items the performance seems very poor.

I think you can see this a little bit with Nautilus, Thunar, etc. When in directories containing a large amount of files, for example /usr/bin. Contrast that with Konqueror.

*I'm not entirely sure GtkTreeView is the actual widget used for the list view in Nautilus&Thunar. Same thing though.

jclmusic
May 19th, 2007, 09:06 AM
i find gnome tends to run faster, but i've only tried the comparison on one set of hardware so as u say it's subjective and relative.

GeneralZod
May 19th, 2007, 09:56 AM
I tend (good word? I'm native francophone...)


Perfect word :)



to agree with you on that. I tried back Gnome with no eye-candy (compiz) and kde alone they both seems quite crispy and snappy. But thats remains personal feeling and it is not backed by any technical arguments.

But I am very curious (I should have had mentionned it in the first post) about technical reasons to back those feelings, as some you gave in the post you linked


The stuff pertaining to fonts was to do with the invocation of fontconfig, which has some coverage here:

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1627

I'm not sure whether this is solveable by continued optimistion of fontconfig, or whether the call to it upon every app start up can be removed.

For the stuff about linkage times, http://people.redhat.com/drepper/dsohowto.pdf is a good (albeit technical) resource. One quote stands out (about the startup times of OO.o, a large, C++-based app) :



"Even if we are assuming that only 20% of the string is
searched before finding a mismatch (which is an opti-
mistic guess since every symbol name is compared com-
pletely at least once to match itself) this would mean a to-
tal of more then 18.5 million characters have to be loaded
from memory and compared. No wonder that the startup
is so slow, especially since we ignored other costs."


Note that this gargantuan bunch of string comparisons considers only the time taken to link an app against its libraries; the time taken for the app to initialise itself is not even considered.

"C" apps could suffer from this also, but the lack of namespacing support in the language means that exported symbols tend to be shorter than those in a well-written (classes logically organised into namespaces; descriptive variable names; etc) C++ app or library, as people hate typing out hugely long function names, so the linkage time tends to be shorter.

GCC's -fvisibility stuff allows programmers to (I think) reduce the linkage time by declaring batches of symbols to be "local" to the library/ app, so that the linker can simply ignore them. Or maybe the other way round; symbols are declared local by default, and only explicitly exported symbols need to be linked. I dunno :)

Hope this helps :)

jbaerbock
August 6th, 2007, 02:11 AM
I find in my experiences that Gnome loads faster but once loaded KDE is the winner in speed. KDE seems snapier but I do also agree takes decades to load FireFox the first time, after the first load during that session it loads faster though.

Also obviously polls such as which DE do you use Gnome or KDE are going to be a bit bias since this is a Gnome Ubuntu forum. I suspect if we go to the Kubuntu forum most will say they prefer or use KDE. To make a valid poll one would have to advertise a poll on a neutral site and make sure a large amount and variety of people voted.

Granted ubuntu forums are used by many different people the general sentiment I have found on this forum is that of pro Gnome. I like some aspects of each and so I use both forums :D though I use Kubuntu KDE.

(Edit: Note my favorite Distro is Mint Gnome thus far and just recently, about a month ago, started delving into Kubuntu KDE)

joe.turion64x2
August 6th, 2007, 03:01 AM
If KDE is slightly faster than GNOME, I can not tell for sure. However, the fact that GNOME consumes less RAM that KDE does enables me to run more applications at once. At least I find it easier to do it that way.

Joe.

bomanizer
January 29th, 2008, 11:56 AM
When we are talking about speed, is the issue:

A) app load time
B) app response
C) updating of screen elements/graphics

?

I find the lag in graphics the most annoying of these. For example, if I have two to three apps running and I drag a smaller window over a bigger one, there are these "ghost" images of the window being dragged. This is Gnome WITHOUT desktop effects. The "ghosts" disappear when i use Compiz which is kinda counter-intuitive.

My best bet is that this has to do with a combination of the distro, desktop environment and the graphics driver. My set is Gutsy, Gnome and the "radeon" driver.

EDIT: found a trick to "kill the ghosts": http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/10/06/turning-off-window-animations-in-gnome/

Xbehave
January 29th, 2008, 12:23 PM
If KDE is slightly faster than GNOME, I can not tell for sure. However, the fact that GNOME consumes less RAM that KDE does enables me to run more applications at once. At least I find it easier to do it that way.

Joe.
really i got told that FUD when i first switched but more recently i found out that

xfce < kde3 < gnome < kde4

but that was for generic systems kubuntu's kde may use more than ubunutu's gnome

the poll sucks tho it should have options
gnome (i ran tests)
gnome
ill be honest i dont know
kde
kde ( i ran tests)

then we'd probably see something like
5%
40%
43%
5%
7%

not giving a dont know / neither option means that all the fan boys have just voted for thier DE, in a particularly rubbish test, i know my kde system takes abit longer to load than my alternatives ( fluxbox ect) but once running similar programs run at similar speeds (they load slower in kde ( although if i simply kill kicker the load time seams about the same)

tehet
January 29th, 2008, 01:56 PM
Here are some benchmarks on Suse:
http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

sulligogs
August 28th, 2008, 08:18 PM
Hi all,

I'd been using Debian Lenny with the default Gnome desktop for a few months before I've only in the past few weeks had a crack at KDE and I will gladly say that KDE (3.5.9) is far superior with its graphics rendering.

On two nVidia machines, one a 750mhz Duron with 768MB ram and the other an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1.25GB ram, both were using the Gnome desktop until I made the switch. What I immediately noticed was how muck quicker the desktop redraws when moving windows around. Also, on the 750mhz machine, when scrolling through lists there would be slight stutters that although was minimal, it was still enough to become a growing annoyance.

The Konqueror file manager/web browser is an absolute charm as well. It is speed, speed speed all the way with this thing. I then read how even Safari, the Apple Mac web browser, even uses some of the KHTML rendering engine of Konqueror for it's own purposes. That really impressed me as when you browse with this gift from the Gods you get a real taste of what clean coding should be like.

I like Gnome and how simplistic it keeps itself. But, spending a bit of time with KDE and getting used to its letter K overkill has finally won me over.

KDE for me is the superior desktop.

Sulligogs

doorknob60
August 28th, 2008, 09:25 PM
In Ubuntu, Gnome is faster (at least in 7.10 when I last used it), but in Debian, KDE seems a lot faster (and Nautilus looks like Windows 95's explorer, it's terrible, but changable), it even seems faster than Xubuntu (it uses less RAM than Xubuntu...) Debian rules :D

TheDebianGuy
January 10th, 2011, 08:54 PM
To me, gnome is by far faster, around 5 seconds or so on log-in. And since i do not have 3d acceleration or other things, poor graphics card, 1.7ghz amd64 athlon processor, even with compiz all my stuff is FAR faster than KDE. I think even with a new pc, you can get much cooler stuff, more speed and stuff using experimental compiz and still having more speed.:popcorn::popcorn:

Quadunit404
January 10th, 2011, 09:19 PM
http://angelicvoices.net/Thread_Necromancy.jpg

sarge77
February 2nd, 2012, 03:52 PM
Getting use to KDE on Kubuntu Ubuntu makes it easy I never really gave KDE an honest try just always fell right into Gnome desktop but now with the Unity Things are better for me in KDE still learning some new stuff which makes gnome vs kde different like the theme switch. Sorry Unity fans Love KDE as far as speed both seem to be the same for me fast I have a Pentium D 3.2 with 2Gbs of RAM both systems on separate HDD I heard you can install both themes on one desktop probably should of tried that but switched windows XP over Kubuntu only thing would of been better was should Kubuntu on boot it all says ubuntu LOL