Linux Mint Forums

I have been reading a lot recently about the performance benefits of Crunchbang and similar light -weight distros and so i decided to dual boot crunchbang with Mint 8 and compare the conkies. You have to understand that this is entirely a non-pro enthusiast's exercise and i do not think it has any technical merit whatsoever. Even the boot times are not as per any bootchart or log, but timed with a stopwatch measuring the period from when i press the power switch till when my Desktop, panels and launchers are loaded, wired connection becomes active and the right click responds. Memory usages were recorded after consecutively opening the apps mentioned

Mint 8 / #! Linux

Boot time: 45-46 seconds / 38-40 seconds

Memory usage after opening terminal & conky: 19% / 14%

Memory after starting Firefox and streaming radio: 24% / 18%

Memory after starting Blender: 27% / 21%

Memory after OpenOffice Word/Abiword 28% / 21-22%

Memory after Gimp 31% / 26%

So what do i conclude from this? I am not saying a word!

Interesting.

Incidentally conky does not show all the memory in use.
It does not show buffers or cached memory.
Run this command in terminal to see the total memory in use. Compare it to conky and be

i truly am! The buffer's cache does occupy a significant chunk in Mint. Considering that #! too can play all the media out the box along with having the commonly used apps, it does have an edge, performance wise, if one was prepared to be weaned from Gnome (on which, i am willing to wager, the majority of Linux users have grown), the eye-candy, etc. and venture into the unknown territory of OpenDesk and the Terminal. Well, this forum and it's members are doing a great job of preparing me for the adventure, i might one day, but not just yet.

I would be interested to see the same comparison using LM fluxbox CE rather than the main edition, hint hint.

I'm not quite comfortable with Linux in general to distro-hop and try my own comparison (been on Linux <2 months), but I've been having lots of fun DE-hopping within the LM distro...