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And here is a memory usage test written by a gnome guy a couple of years back for KDE3. Gnome and KDE use more or less the same amount of memory: http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kdevsgnome.html

So unless our troll is using emacs or windowmaker or something like that for his "desktop environment" he should take his anonymous coward business elsewhere.

KDE 3.x and GNOME use almost exactly the same amount of memory.

http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kdevsgnome.html

You can verify the numbers yourself, there are instructions included. Or rather you can find out the current state, since the article is more than a year old. As for something done by somebody from GNOME, there is http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kdevsgnome.html, written later, that says the usage is roughly the same. Note however that despite being some kind of a response to the first comparison this one measures the numbers in a way that is not recommended by it, and it even admits so in the 3rd paragraph (go figure). Not that I have any real reason to disprove the numbers though, it may very well be that in that specific configuration the usage was roughly the same, within the noise caused by the measurement method.

So yes, to sum it up, just generally claiming that KDE is more bloated than GNOME is a nonsense and has been for a long time (and maybe even that's never been true, for fair comparisons, but I don't remember anybody doing one in the long past, at most various flawed comparisons).

PS: And, just in case you find some similarity between my nick and the URL of the first comparison, it is not incidental.

If it would be only a *tiny* amount of performance difference, there would not be alot of people in the forum mentioning that they prefer Gnome over KDE cuz Gnome runs faster

There are also a lot of people claiming the exact opposite, which lends support to my "tiny difference" theory. It's so tiny, the placebo effect completely overrides it.

KDE stills eats more RAM than Gnome. Bigtime.

Read the link, please - it actually doesn't. Here they are again:

KDE and GNOME identical to within a few MB!? How can we start a flame war with that? A very big congratulations to everyone working on the optimisation of GNOME! Now you just have to worry about what surprises KDE 4 will pull.

And yet, despite all the extra features and configurability, KDE still manages to use about the same resources as GNOME:

I have a saying: If Ubuntu is the worst thing to happen to KDE, then Kubuntu is the second. I simply don't understand how they've made such a great desktop so bad.

Oh, and since I've resolved to keep posting these links until it finally penetrates into the public consciousness, here are links comparing the memory usage of GNOME and KDE. The first is by a KDE dev using a slightly outdated version of GNOME; the second by a GNOME dev using GNOME 2.16:

http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmar k.html

http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kde vsgnome.html

This is, of course, without the significant automatic gains that will come with the switch to Qt4. I think it's time to put the "KDE is teh bloated!!!" (at least, compared to GNOME :)) meme to rest, don't you?

Next up: "KDE is teh windoze!" in the face of GNOME integrating a clone of Microsoft's fucking .NET platform (initiated, of course, by everyone's favourite GNOME founder and would-be Microsoft employee). If only KDE had taken the bold step of moving the taskbar to the top of the screen like their GNOME brethren, this meme would likely never have taken hold :(

Actually, a KDE dev ran experiments in the past and had numbers that agreed with the article. Heres his results: http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmar k.html

Later a GNOME dev ran his own tests with a more optimized version of GNOME and GNOME did a bit better, but KDE still won: http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kde vsgnome.html

Looks like reality is a bit different than your beliefs!

The author is a KDE developer so he naturally favors KDE, but as far as I can tell, there is no obvious unfairness in his analysis, and it is very easy to reproduce the tests yourself.

Here's an update written by a GNOME person:

http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/kde vsgnome.html

tldr: they have (essentially) the same memory requirements.