The usefulness of the application outweighs the performance impact it has on the system – a feature of a successful app.Eg Konsole is a very nice KDE application and is the only one of its kind. Stability is an area where KDE sucks and GNOME is quite stable. But I think KDE would still be the desktop environment of the future, since the development is active as well as I find they are putting their efforts in improving performance a key area. In that context , XFCE would be a good alternative to KDE and may even beat KDE. GNOME will be remembered for it’s useful applications.
| KDE | GNOME | XFCE | |
| Speed | good | poor | very good |
| Stability | poor | good | very good |
| Useful Apps | good | good | It can run both KDE and GNOME apps |
| Memory Impact | high | high | low |
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kde have better apps
Any concrete numbers, in terms of kernel time, or memory usage?
No I don’t have any such numbers. But I’ve tried running heavy applications in all the three and I find XFCE to be best in performance. But KDE4 has improved so much, and I find it almost equal in performance with XFCE.