After the initial release of LXQt, I found that there is a FAQ. How’s the memory usage? Will it become a bloated memory hog because of Qt? Here are some numbers for you.

My test environment is the latest Debian stable installed in VirtualBox with 512 MB of RAM and 1 CPU core assigned. After cold boot, the memory usage is as follows.

Plain Openbox only: 58 MB

XFCE: 89 MB (with default configuration of Debian. This value will increase after xfce is ported to gtk+ 3)

LXDE (gtk+ 2 version): 78 MB (add 20 MB to openbox)

LXQt: 95 MB (add 37 MB to openbox, still has some room for optimization)

The screen resolution is 1280 x 1024. So a wallpaper roughly used 1280x1024x4 bytes = 5MB of RAM. If you don’t set a wallpaper, this number can be lower. Besides, this is a virtual machine so some special modules for vbox are loaded. I turned off printer service and network-manager applet since they’re not used.

Yes, the memory usage slightly increased, but the difference is really negligible. Moreover, LXQt has more features, such as a better program launcher and new power management stuff.

Apparently the gtk+ 2 version uses less memory, but we cannot use gtk+ 2 forever. It’s not a secret that gtk+ 3 is not a memory saver. So, I’d say Qt is really not that bad.

Why yet another DE? Why can’t you do something more innovative? I think the answer for this FAQ is simple.

Nowadays everything goes mobile and touch, but we still saw unmet need for a classic desktop environment . Otherwise, Windows xp should have been killed years ago and Windows 8 should have high market share now.

. Otherwise, Windows xp should have been killed years ago and Windows 8 should have high market share now. In the history of free software, we see forking everyday, but (successful) merging rarely happened. We want to prove that it actually works. People can focus on what they can share with each other, not how they are different.

The following is my personal opinion (not on behalf of other LXQt developers)

Seriously, if a 17 MB memory usage increment can buy us faster development, more active developers [Figure 1], more contributors, and a healthier upstream community, that’s definitely worth it. When I say healthier, I mean those who do not hold a “Follow our way, or go away!” attitude. This is just as important as other technical considerations when you choose a toolkit.

Many people like to argue that Qt is not C++ since it requires a pre-processor. Did anyone tell you that Gtk+ actually uses a preprocessor, too? Check the manpage of “glib-genmarshal” please. Without this pre-processor to generate some code for you, it will be awfully difficult to add signals to your GObjects. That’s not C language, right?

It does not really matter for users what toolkit you’re using given the final result works. Let’s save some time not arguing which is better and focus on what we can do with them. 🙂

Figure 1. A screenshot from Google Trend

