Last week I posted some initial GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop gaming benchmarks on Ubuntu 25.04 beta for looking at the performance of those two leading desktop options for this upcoming Ubuntu Linux release. Both GNOME and KDE under Wayland were outperforming KDE on X11 (and GNOME on X11 wasn’t even working due to bugs). Some Phoronix readers questioned though whether the Wayland advantage on GNOME/KDE was due to those desktops losing focus on X11 support or if they are just too bloated. So for adding some additional context, here are some graphics/gaming benchmarks on the same system hardware/software when adding in the Xfce 4.20 and LXQt 2.1 X11 desktops.
On top of the GNOME 48 Wayland, KDE Plasma 6.3.3 Wayland, and KDE Plasma 6.3.3 X11 results from last week on Ubuntu 25.04, today’s article adds in data from Xfce 4.20 and LXQt 2.1. Both were using the X11-based environment and from their packages currently found in Ubuntu 25.04.
The same AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D with Radeon RX 7900 XTX system was used for this testing. The same Ubuntu 25.04 stack powered by Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25.0.1 was used for all of these tests with just changing out the packaged desktop session used for each round of benchmarking. Let’s see if the lightweight LXQt and Xfce desktops on X11 can outperform GNOME Wayland and KDE Plasma Wayland environments…
