Best desktop for low latency performance?

[fourfour]

Has anyone found that different desktop affect the number of xruns? Or is everything offloaded to the graphics system? I know that, say, fluxbox, is lightweight, but is it less of a magnet for system resources?

[Thad E Ginathom]

Yes.

My early experiences with Jack (which I needed to use because I wanted to play music via a Firewire interface) were a disaster. In windows, I found out that the machine had very, very high DPC Latency. Linux didn't seem to help it much either. Jack spent its time xrunning, with only occasional snippets of sound.



There are, it seems, certain combinations of hardware...

[i2productions]

My experience too is that it's more hardware based. If you have a modern PC with lot's a processing power, a pile of RAM, and a good graphics cards the desktop makes little difference. I use cinnamon(Gnome-shell based) which is one of the more resource intensive DE's, and I haven't found any xrun or otherwise difference using LXDE or XFCE for example. Go with what works for you and your hardware!

[GraysonPeddie]

My laptop (HP Pavilion dv7-6168nr) is a pretty decent machine for handling KDE without any problems with Kubuntu 12.04. I've had zero xruns except when it comes to turning PulseAudio when not needed. Before I turn off PulseAudio, I've had like 4.5-5% total CPU consumption, but after I turn off PulseAudio, it went down to 0.9% as reported by Cadence, part of KXStudio tools.

Due to my experience, I'd try to avoid PulseAudio whenever possible as I don't have the need for it except for some applications requiring PulseAudio (probably some music players and elimination of choppy audio when using Firefox but still no xruns).

This is with a 10ms latency.

[CrocoDuck]

Hi, maybe DE is not so essential for audio performance, expecially if you have a brand new computer. But on my 8 years old little-tux-home-recording machine with 512 Mb of ram switching to lxde made xrun number visibly smaller, running jack, Ardour and Guitarix with 5.33 ms of latency and good stability. I would raccomand lxde or xfce for best performances.

[Havoc]

I find that it pays to build a software system that just caters for that what you want to do and nothing else instead of the preconfigured distro settings. Occacionally you run into some obscure setting issue but rarely this has to do with the DE, like firewire needing an impair number of periods/buffers in Jack. Only time I run into xruns is when I run "emerge --sync" while Jack is running.

[Nachei]

I settled a long time ago on Ratpoison WM and never looked back. It is strongly keyboard reliant, fully customizable, does not consume a single pixel of screen real estate, and its memory requirements are very little...

[brummer]

Hi, maybe DE is not so essential for audio performance, expecially if you have a brand new computer. But on my 8 years old little-tux-home-recording machine with 512 Mb of ram switching to lxde made xrun number visibly smaller, running jack, Ardour and Guitarix with 5.33 ms of latency and good stability. I would raccomand lxde or xfce for best performances.

same here, running several years xfce but switch now to lxde witch I found is the best DE out there "for me and my needs" today, maybe tomorrow I switch to . - . - .

[Capoeira]

I started with KDE, but switched to LXDE because I had an older PC.
never liked the look of LXDE and when I found out E17 I found the perfect DE for me. Beautyfull and userfriendly as KDE and lightweight as LXDE.
Razer-Qt is also a good alternetive, but it's still very limited.

[slowpick]

I have E17 desktop, with kde libs underneath, and it makes for a beautiful
and easy to use workspace, that doesn't use much system resource, and is
very stable. I restart X from a menu, if I get things twisted. Maybe once a
month.

[hellalive]

On my newer computer i use Unity as the machine is powerful and can it doesn't make the difference; however on mid- and low.power compoters - like my netbook - i think xfce is a good compromise between resource usage and eye pleasure.

[GraysonPeddie]

It would be nice to see if there are any performance differences between every window manager/desktop environment with either an AMD A8-3870K Black Edition or an Intel Core i3 2130 (dual core with HyperThreading). Do note that this is not Intel versus AMD as Intel is always the king of performance.

[brummer]

I guess that depend on how far you drive your system to the limit.
So to say as nearer you work-flow comes to the system limits, as more benefit you have from a light window/desktop manager. With faster CPU and more ram you benefit later, or maybe no benefit at all, again depend on your work-flow.

[Capoeira]

for all those who didn't dare to try out E17 because it is "beta",
After only 12 years of developing, E17 finaly will be released.
looking forward to E18 at 2020 allready.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Phoronix ... -Z4/vr.php