I feel bad for falling for the "GNOME is bloated" narrative now

The Water Cooler
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I have been using KDE Plasma for as long as I can remember because there are only two DEs that meet my needs, most importantly the “xdg Global Shortcuts” implementation. One of them is Gnome and the other is KDE Plasma.

For some reason I always saw the same narrative: Plasma has the best performance for gaming, Gnome is bloated. Your milage may vary of course, but that’s always the same conclusion I landed on.

Recently I’ve been growing more and more displeased with Plasma because of all the features I didn’t need, with no way to disable them “looking at you akonadi” and with multi-monitor support getting borked due to a niche issue at 6.7 update, I had to look for a new DE.

First I tried Cosmic and while it is nice, it’s not mature enough, lacking many basic and vital functionalities that I need. So this time I decided to create live USBs and test Gnome, the “bloated” DE. Before that though, I needed some reference points to figure out just how bloated it was. So for vram consumption I used “amdgpu_top” and for ram consumption I used “top”.

A quick divergence here: ram isn’t the concern for me, as I have 32gb which is plenty for my use case, but I am really short on vram at 8gb. I do simracing, which is quite heavy on vram and I stream on top of that so it’s not uncommon to hit 7.8gb vram usage after an hour of gaming/streaming. That’s why my emphasis will be on vram and not the ram usage.

Anyway, Cosmic uses a really low 298mb of vram on its own. If you exclude the terminal window where amdgpu_top runs, you can shave off another 50mb but I kept it in just to be straightforward. Ram usage is at 1.6gb.

Then I tried Workstation live USB with Gnome in it and vram usage increases some, up to 374mb. Not a huge increase, but an increase nonetheless. Ram usage increases even more noticeably up to 2.9gb. However, as mentioned before it’s not a huge issue for me. Turns out when you boot through a live usb, ram usage balloons up a bit. After a proper installation, ram usage is now at 1.7gb which is in line with Cosmic which is superb.

At that point I wanted to take a look back at KDE Plasma to see how things go there just to be thorough and honestly what I saw there shattered my view of Gnome and Plasma alike. On a fresh login, KDE Plasma uses a whopping 789mb of vram! And the list of processes consuming vram goes on and on. A handful of Akonadi services (as I was suspicious), kdeconnect, kwallet, plasma keyboard, and on and on. The only weight reduction I could perform was by turning off Plasma Keyboard, which shaves 100mb off of vram usage. Rest are so tightly integrated into Plasma, there is no way of simply removing them. Ram usage was even worse at 3.4gb

So all things considered, Gnome is not bad at all. Yes, compared to Cosmic there is a jump in resource usage, but Cosmic is so barebones one could say upon reaching feature parity, Cosmic will also reach around 350mb vram usage I am sure. At the very least they need to implement session restore, global hotkeys, remote connection etc. which I’m sure will make the compositor heavier in the end.

It felt funny how I ended up deciding on what I always thought was the heaviest DE. Considering the feature richness and lightness of it, I think it’s a fair compromise to ditch Cosmic for Gnome at this point. I wanted to share my findings in the hopes it can help someone at some point. Sorry for the wall of text and thanks for reading :slight_smile:

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I never knew that people thought that GNOME was bloated. My main point of contention with it was the difficulty of using it. It’s a very minimalist setup and I have never quite got the hang of it.

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I was able to dnf remove all the akonadi stuff on a small system without issue.

I just cannot get on with the UX of gnome.
Plasma allows me to create my desktop, gnome forces me to use their desktop.

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Right, akonadi isn’t an inseparable part of Plasma. (e.g. KDE Linux has no Akonadi at all unless you install a Flatpak that runs Akonadi inside of itself).

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As far as I remember, when GNOME shell was introduced (around 15 years ago), it was relatively heavy on CPU/GPU and RAM for the time. The CPU/GPU load has been drastically reduced by writing better code, both for GUI and for GNOME shell’s search feature. The RAM situation is partially caused by GNOME shell using JavaScript, and that localsearch (originally named “tracker”) and other search providers just hold a lot of data in RAM. You can reduce the memory pressure by removing some of the search providers, especially the one from GNOME software.

Other than that, I consider GNOME quite easy on resources now – partially also because not just KDE, also macOS and Windows got more resource hungry, while GNOME did not for the last decade.

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A correction. I realized that live usb uses more ram than proper installation. After a clean installation, Gnome ram usage dropped down to 1.7gb. Which brings it in line with Cosmic and that makes me like it even more. So far so good!

How it looks also fits me really well, as I want nothing but simplicity. No need for excessive customizability, no need for features that cover everything I may or may not need. Just the basics with a simple interface. I am honestly happy here.

And I hope it stays that way. For me, less is more and I feel at home here. The only other Fedora spin where I felt comfortable and at ease was Sway, which I think makes my expectations clear :slight_smile:

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I dont think GNOME or KDE are particularly bloated. I just think they look dated, especially compared to a modern DE like COSMIC.

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KDE Plasma and COSMIC look very, very similar. I don’t see how one is “Dated” and the other is “Modern”.

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I unhid taskbar icons on Plasma 6.6.5 and was surprised at the icons (guess that’s why they’re hidden by-default); I tried removing weather as a package and there wasn’t one (weather icon/system seems baked-into Plasma vs GNOME that’s gnome-weather).

I’ve wondered how KDE got a pass for bloat compared to Windows.

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Because on windows you can’t turn them off. You can on KDE.

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Its a matter of opinion. I dont think they look similar at all.

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Vapid nonsense.

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I’ll plasma till my last breath :slight_smile:

Gnome is a joke. (personal opinion)

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It looks like the weather stuff is in an rpm you can remove if you want;

$ rpm -qf /usr/lib64/qt6/plugins/plasma/applets/org.kde.plasma.weather.so
kdeplasma-addons-6.7.3-1.fc44.x86_64
$ dnf remove kdeplasma-addons
Package                                 Arch       Version                                 Repository               Size
Removing:
 kdeplasma-addons                       x86_64     0:6.7.3-1.fc44                          updates              14.9 MiB
Removing unused dependencies:
 hidapi                                 x86_64     0:0.15.0-3.fc44                         fedora              110.2 KiB

Transaction Summary:
 Removing:           2 packages

After this operation, 15 MiB will be freed (install 0 B, remove 15 MiB).
Is this ok [y/N]: n
Operation aborted by the user.

But that might remove stuff you want…

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I think the main divide between Gnome and KDE Plasma is not the “bloat” which is more or less the same, it is the “traditional desktop” metaphor versus the “workspace paging”.

Now, could both Gnome and KDE Plasma be much more efficient, optimized, less bloated?

Who knows, I am not involved in coding neither, I cannot measure the quality of the code and I cannot say if the same features could be implemented in a different better way.

All I can do is compare both with a pure Window Manager (I don’t do tiling) or some legacy Desktop Environment like XFCE, which I had been using for quite a while (it grew its own little bloat with time anyway).

For my current “workflow” Gnome is much better so I willingly pay the “bloat” tribute.

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Until recently mass storage space was cheap so cost of bloat was affordable. Once the current backlog of bugs discovered by AI’s I expect new efforts to minimize distro mass storage footprints as well runtime RAM requirements.

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KDE Connect is also removable - sudo dnf remove kde-connect

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I personally believe that a limited effort may happen, however hardware manufacturers will innovate and Mass Storage Space + RAM will return to “Normal” pricing.

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I didn’t realised GNOME sends police to people who install extensions

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