Estimating Resource Consumption by Official Ubuntu Editions

The Register conducted testing of memory and disk consumption after installing editions of the Ubuntu 21.04 distribution with different desktops in the VirtualBox virtual machine. The tests 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 turned out to be Lubuntu, the memory consumption after launching the desktop was 357 MB, and the disk space consumption after installation was 7.3 GB. The highest memory consumption was demonstrated by the main version of Ubuntu with GNOME (710 MB), and the highest disk space consumption was demonstrated by Kubuntu (11 GB). At the same time, in terms of memory consumption, Kubuntu showed quite good performance - 584 MB, second only to 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 Kubuntu 3.6 11 4.2 72 584 2.6 11 Lubuntu 556 2.9 3.5 7.3 2.8 50 357 Ubuntu Budgie 2.8 7 600 3.2 2.5 9.8 4.6. 69 Ubuntu MATE 657 2.4 5 719 2.9 2.4 10 4.4 70 Xubuntu 591 2.5 9 714 2.9 2.5 9.4 5

For comparison, in similar testing of Ubuntu 13.04 editions conducted in 2013, the following indicators were obtained:

Редакция RAM consumption 2013 RAM consumption 2022 Change in Disk Consumption 2013 Disc consumption 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