Requires a new (>2.6.27 I think) kernel.

Which actually brings me to a more important realisation. All the above apps (to the best of my knowledge) are media centre applications. They handle everything media related. xmms2 is purely a media player, so it’s in a different category.

So yes, it’s an interesting point in that we have a baseline to compare against when all you want to do is play music. But as a comparison to media centre applications, it’s not quite as useful.

I think his point was mostly that you’re comparing apples and oranges there. For a more apples-apples comparison you’d need to add the memory usage for both xmms2 a controlling GUI.

Though as with all these memory comparisons, you also should really take into account what features are offered in the GUI. It’s easy to make an app that does essentially nothing and also takes up very little memory. It’s hard to make an app that does a lot and also takes up very little memory. The trade is, as always, features versus memory.

For example, can xmms2 sync to/from your portable media device? ;)

You brought up Gnome, I did not. Personally, I run Awesome WM (although most of my non-CLI apps are GTK or or Gnome). Anyway, I just threw that out there for fun.

I suspect he’s on a 64bit system, where VIRT is inflated by shared libraries to a point that it’s meaningless.

Dumping a bunch of numbers out is never useful, because people who don’t know any better will just spread false rumors. I suggest that the VIRT column to be removed or at least a strong warning that those numbers are meaningless.