Resource Consumption Evaluation of Official Ubuntu Editions

The Register conducted testing on memory and disk consumption after installing various desktop editions of Ubuntu 21.04 in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The test included Ubuntu with GNOME 42, Kubuntu with KDE 5.24.4, Lubuntu with LXQt 0.17, Ubuntu Budgie with Budgie 10.6.1, Ubuntu MATE with MATE 1.26, and Xubuntu with Xfce 4.16.

The lightest distribution was Lubuntu, which consumed 357 MB of memory after starting the desktop environment and used 7.3 GB of disk space after installation. The main variant Ubuntu with GNOME showed the highest memory consumption (710 MB), while Kubuntu had the largest disk usage (11 GB). However, in terms of memory usage, Kubuntu performed quite well with 584 MB, only behind Lubuntu (357 MB) and Xubuntu (479 MB), but ahead of Ubuntu (710 MB), Ubuntu Budgie (657 MB), and Ubuntu MATE (591 MB).

  Disk used (GiB) Disk free (GiB) Usage (%) RAM used (MiB) RAM free (GiB) RAM shared (MiB) Buff/cache (MiB) Avail (GiB) ISO size (GiB) Ubuntu 9.3 5.1 65 710 2.3 1 762 2.8 3.6 Kubuntu 11 4.2 72 584 2.6 11 556 2.9 3.5 Lubuntu 7.3 2.8 50 357 2.8 7 600 3.2 2.5 Ubuntu Budgie 9.8 4.6 69 657 2.4 5 719 2.9 2.4 Ubuntu MATE 10 4.4 70 591 2.5 9 714 2.9 2.5 Xubuntu 9.4 5 66 479 2.7 1 545 3.1 2.3

For comparison, similar testing of Ubuntu 13.04 editions conducted in 2013 yielded the following results:

Edition RAM Consumption 2013 RAM Consumption 2022 Change Disk Usage 2013 Disk Usage 2022 Lubuntu 119 MB 357 MB 3 times 2 GB 7.3 GB Xubuntu 165 MB 479 MB 2.9 times 2.5 GB 9.4 GB Ubuntu (Unity) 229 MB — — 2.8 GB — Ubuntu GNOME 236 MB 710 MB 3 times 3.1 GB 9.3 GB Kubuntu 256 MB 584 MB 2.3 times 3.3 GB 11 GB

Source: opennet.ru