Which Linux/Unix desktop environment will make you work and play faster? Marco Fioretti gets benchmarking to find out what's leading the pack, and what needs to go on a diet. On the scales: Gnome, KDE and Xfce, along with their file managers, terminals and text editors...

It's widely accepted that Gnome and KDE are the heaviest Unix desktops, while Xfce is lighter and faster. Yet many accuse Xfce of piling on the pounds in recent releases, and debates rage on as to whether Gnome or KDE is the king of the memory munchers. So we've gathered together some extensive benchmarks to find out the real story.

A desktop environment (DE) is not a window manager (WM) - the latter is a program which only draws and manages all the windows on your screen. A desktop environment is a homogeneous collection of tools, from window and file managers to hardware configuration utilities and (theoretically) any other application you may ever need. "Homogeneous" means that all pieces share the same base libraries and design guidelines, reusing interfaces (eg the file selector) and communicating with one another in various ways, from copy and pasting to opening a browser whenever you click on a URL.

For our tests we used the desktops packaged in Fedora 9 (this article was written just before Fedora 10 was released): Gnome 2.22.3, KDE 4.1.2 and Xfce 4.4.2. Our test machine was a dual-core AMD 64 3800+ system with 2 GB of RAM.

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