Pls., which is more lighweight---

[UUUnicorn]

Please, just curious--which is likely to be more lightweight:

Linux Mint 13 Xfce, or

Linux Mint 13 MATE?

Thank you.

Sincerely,

UUUnicorn

[veggen]

Not sure about this, but it makes sense to expect Xfce to be lighter. Mate is basically Gnome 2, and Xfce is lighter than Gnome 2.

[drdavidk]

True: XFCE is a lighter desktop than MATE. Both Mint 13 MATE and XFCE are based on Ubuntu, however, so neither are as light as Mint's own Debian Editions.

[UUUnicorn]

Okay; thank you.

UUUnicorn

[amandawillow]

I noticed in comparison with LXDE (older LM LXDE versions and Lubuntu Precise) the Xfce version of Maya starts up really slowly. Conversely, though, Xfce seems to be much faster in shutting down.

[nunol]

For Mint 13 32bits i686:
190MB MATE
180MB Cinnamon 3D
135MB XFCE RC

If you add and use the LXDE desktop on top you get:
100MB MATE+LXDE
95MB Cinnamon+LXDE
90MB XFCE+LXDE

LMDE XFCE i486/i686-pae uses 110MB, Mint 12 LXDE i686 100MB and Lubuntu 12.04 i686 90MB. You can tune all a little to get the RAM utilization down.

All values are from Vbox and are approximated.

[windtalker]

I'm running XFCE on a 486 with 1 gig of ram.

I've also installed E17, lxde, openbox, blackbox and fluxbox. They all boot the same for me with no tweaking. I prefer XFCE because I have more options so I stuck with it and tweaked it so that it's fully booted and online in about 25 - 28 seconds. I never timed it but that's a close estimate.

You can lower your boot time by doing a few things.

1.] go to /menu/settings/session and startup/application autostart. Untick what you don't need to start on boot. If you don't have blue tooth, remove the tick. Same for a printer/scanner. If you don't have, want or need it, untick it.

2.] Open a terminal and type in sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Look for the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash". You can either add the word profile so that the line looks like GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash profile" or remove the quiet splash and just have profile. When you've made the change strike ctrl x and then y for yes. Next type into the same terminal sudo update-grub2. What this does is on your next boot a profile will be built of your boot process and committed to memory. No searching has to be done to see what you want to boot and what you don't want to boot.

3.] Be careful on this one. This change stops your hd from being checked on each boot. It makes a big diff on your boot but your hd won't be checked for irregularities. Open a terminal and type sudo nano /etc/fstab. Look for the lines

UUID=269ee6cb-f20e-49e4-8f8f-d3daa7631ed1 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 0
# /home was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=dbf87a53-ba05-4731-82d8-86e302ec78cb /home ext4 defaults 0 0
# swap was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=0b4bcd5a-5142-4411-a8ba-c80bea39fbfc none swap sw 0 0

That's my fstab. The lines for / and /home have a 0 at the end of the lines. Yours should have a 2 and 5 if memory serves correctly. Change them to zero and save.

4.]Open synaptic and install start up manager. After it's installed it will be in /menu/system. Change your boot delay to 0.

5.]Go to /menu/system/login window/security. Tick enable auto login if you're the only user on your system.

There is also a tweak to speed up XFCE after the boot but you have to have at least a gig of ram if anyone is interested. Just lemme know.

[nunol]

I'm running XFCE on a 486 with 1 gig of ram.

Are you sure it's a 486? Run "cat /proc/cpuinfo" (or "inxi -Cxx" in Mint) to find out.

I you need some more tips check the PDF file in this thread: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=96465

[windtalker]

I'm running XFCE on a 486 with 1 gig of ram.

Are you sure it's a 486? Run "cat /proc/cpuinfo" (or "inxi -Cxx" in Mint) to find out.

I you need some more tips check the PDF file in this thread: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=96465

processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz <<<<<<<<
stepping : 9
microcode : 0x21
cpu MHz : 2793.029
cache size : 512 KB


I have my desktop running off of ram since it's faster than swap. I run a screenlets app that lets me monitor my cpu, ram and swap usage. When the cpu maxes out, the ram usage will go to around 35 - 38% usage and swap will start picking up the slack. The set up isn't as fast as E17 but it's close enough I'm happy with it,,, especially since everything seems stable. No crashes yet. I had one freeze since the install and no clue why that happened. It hasn't repeated the freeze yet so I'm not to concerned with it. Thx for the .pdf link. That oughta come in handy.

[nunol]

Your CPU it's a Pentium 4 (i686 with pae) clock at 2800MHz, any Intel 486 it's one to two orders of magnitude slower than that Pentium 4 and rarely have more than 128MB of RAM.

I find that even a Eee 701 with a 630MHz Celeron and 512MB of RAM it's fast enough to run LXDE or XFCE so on your machine XFCE should be fast enough.

[windtalker]

It is fast enough. But if I can do some tweaks and make it faster.........

[gosa]

If you add and use the LXDE desktop on top you get:
90MB XFCE+LXDE

Just installed lxde on top of Maya 13 xfce on my netbook (Asus 1000HE) and I can confirm this number on an more or less un-tweaked session. I'm saying more or less because I already "peeled off" mintupdate, mintupload and some other things from the autostart in the XFCE session, and these "optimizations" seem to stick when booting into lxde. What is included counting though in those 90MB is the jupiter applet and lxtask, so I imagine that the number is even lower without them.

And as nunol said - I imagine there's a few more things you can take away depending on your preferences...