graeme_p - 8:11 pm on Jun 11, 2009 (gmt 0)

Gomvents, resources at idle can be misleading, especially regarding memory usage. One of the KDE devs did some testing against Gnome and XFCE a few years back, and found that, although KDE was a comparative hog at start-up, it reused libraries and launched at lot of services when the desktop started, so the additional usage from launching more apps etc. was much lower - so it ended up being the most efficient in a fairly realistic test.

This is borne out by my own experience of KDE and XFCE.

httpwebwitch, if it makes you suffer, can you not use another OS?