The PorteuX Linux distribution focused on being a high performance, modular, and minimalist distro took to forking Xfce's xfwm4 window manager into "xfwm4-gl" for OpenGL compositing support. As part of that they developed a window manager / compositor benchmark for evaluating the performance and efficiency of typical operations. Their results are fascinating.

PorteuX Linux developers wrote into Phoronix to share their findings from evaluating Wayland and X11 with different compositor options. Their tests were done on an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS system with Radeon 780M integrated graphics and 32GB of RAM running PorteuX 2.8 Linux. Their data is quite interesting:

They noted in their message that they found " Wayland is intrinsically faster than X11, but not necessarily more efficient -- when it comes to compositing (which excludes openbox), our new xfwm4-gl is the king in this regard. " They found great performance out of KDE Plasma on Wayland along with the likes of Labwc and COSMIC not being far off. For power efficiency they found LXDE with Openbox on X11 and xfwm4-gl to be slightly better than Wayland-based alternatives. Similarly, LXDE/Openbox and Xfce with xfwm4-gl had the lowest CPU utilization.

Those wanting to learn more about their compositor / window manager performance test can do so via [1]wmbench . I'll be checking it out for possible future usage. Those wanting to learn more about the Porteux distribution itself can do so via [2]GitHub . Their Xfce xfwm4 fork can be found in [3]this repository .



[1] https://github.com/fulalas/wmbench/

[2] https://github.com/porteux/porteux

[3] https://github.com/fulalas/xfwm4-gl