I've been a fan of Ubuntu Mate since 17.10, and I have found that Ubuntu Mate was always a beautiful and functional desktop that ran much better than Gnome on my main system which unfortunately has only 4 Gigs of RAM. With an SSD in this older laptop, I have been very happy with the performance and the full featured nature of the Mate desktop on my older hardware.
I just upgraded to 20.04 and with just a terminal and Mate System Monitor open I'm using 1.6 Gigs. I have an identical laptop also with Ubuntu Mate 19.10, and with just a terminal and Mate System Monitor open on that the exact same hardware I'm using 900 megs.
The biggest culprits for system resources on 20.04 on my system with only those two applications open seem to be:
- Gnome Software (not open, and listed as sleeping but taking 432 megs, I could probably uninstall this and just use the CLI which is fine with me)
- Dropbox (245 megs, I'm looking into taking this off this system because of number 3 can cover this functionality)
- Syncthing (238 megs)
- Xorg (144 megs)
- Caja (139 megs)
I noticed that on the 19.10 system I don't have Gnome Software, Dropbox, or Syncthing running which seems to account for most of the difference. Have others noticed an increase in resource usage from 19.10 to 20.04. I thought I remembered Ubuntu Mate on this same hardware being closer to 680 megs of RAM with nothing open but a terminal, but I don't remember checking this regularly with each release. This is still early days, and perhaps 44% RAM usage with little open won't be a big deal in my day to day use of Ubuntu Mate. Might as well use the RAM since it is there
My compliments to the whole team! Seemingly flawless upgrade from 19.10 to 20.04 from what I can tell. The desktop seems very stable. I look forward to kicking the tires some more as this week progresses. Thanks for a wonderful distro!