Considering we have many dozens of distros and ten of thousands of their permutations (different "spins", desktop environments, etc.) this test is always going to be distro specific.

I chose Fedora because of its freshness, proximity to the source (Fedora prefers to apply as few patches as possible vs. e.g. Debian/Ubuntu) and readiness. You just install it and start working.

That's fine, but the disclaimer is important. I did a quick test for myself by choosing what's at the top over at distrowatch(tm).

- Fedora plasma ca. 1.4 GB (matching your numbers) - MX Linux plasma ca. 600 MB - EndeavourOS plasma ca. 800 MB

Considering the significant difference you either have to go into more details or make that disclaimer prominent.

"Fedora" is mentioned prominently in the comparison. Not sure if I could do more :-)

Could you show the top output for your distros? I wonder why there's such a huge discrepancy.

> "Fedora" is mentioned prominently in the comparison. Not sure if I could do more :-)

My bad, I only read the title here and never parsed behind the parenthesis on the original page.

Nonetheless the overall language seems to put a lot of weight on the different desktop environments, not the spin/distribution choices.

> Could you show the top output for your distros? I wonder why there's such a huge discrepancy.

This is from MX Linux: https://pastebin.com/7drT8LWt

Not activating the whole Akonadi PIM subsystem by default should easily free two or three hundred MB on KDE. Not sure about the rest.

Fedora also bundles a bunch of software by default for a nice desktop experience for new users that you wouldn’t get with only Gnome on Arch. The difference is quite big, I’ve used both and Arch is way leaner even with a full install of the Gnome desktop.

True so yet all of them have the same/similar background services/daemons/applications, so the comparison is still valid though it will be distro-specific.

I cannot physically test all the distros and their permutations, and then there are some user-defined ones such as Gentoo or LFS.