I have a desktop PC which double boots #Debian Sid and #Ubuntu 22.04. In Debian I use #Xfce4. In Ubuntu, #Gnome. I executed free -h after a cold boot on both, and, surprise! Gnome uses *less* RAM than Xfce4 (see screenshots). No cheating: Gnome is more modular than most people think, so you can mix and match stuff, making the system lighter or heavier depending on that. And yep, it could be even lighter... Just by removing the snap runtime, for example. ;)
@array GNOME, modular? From using it, I got the impression that it was more modular than it appeared, but I could never quite understand it the way I could KDE.
I'm really curious, how did you mix and match stuff with Gnome, and is there any decent documentation for its architecture?
@golemwire AFAIK gnome-shell (again, from a user's perspective... Some coding wizards could say otherwise ;) ) is not something that is thought to be too modified. Out of light/dark themes and stuff like keyboard shortcuts, accessibility settings and such, there's not much to tinker with. I know that's not the case with Plasma. If you are in the tinkerer side, stay with Plasma no doubt! ;) Me, I just lost time configuring dwm, but once it works as expected I let that sit and keep working. :)