what if i installed lubuntu on an extremely powerful computer?

No. No-one has ever tried installing Linux on a powerful computer. All the supercomputers run Windows - the attempt at Hackintosh didn't take - and are having a tough time meeting the TPM criteria for Win11.

You will be the very first. The world is counting on you.

The DE won't really make much of a performance difference on a high end computer.

You high?

Consider that with the latest hardware your processor is under 1% or 2% load running a bloat machine like windows even if you used the lightest weight distro without any desktop environment at all the maximum possible performance gain would be 1% or 2%.

I didn't see many legitimate answers to your question here so I'll try. Forget the details such as specific processor and memory. Don't get lost in the details of this anology.

Imagine you have a very basic computer and a very advanced, powerful computer. You install Lubunutu on each. The basic computer might require 5% of it's resources just to run the operating system. The advanced computer needs just 0.5% of it's resources to run the OS.

This sounds like a big difference. 10x more resources required for the basic computer! Really though one has 95% left to run other things and one has 99.5%.

If I gave you two glasses of water that were 95% full and 99.5% full you could easily tell the difference between the two. One is basically overflowing and the other is just full. You wouldn't describe either as being half full though.

Now imagine you put something like Fedora workstation on that basic computer. This OS is designed for powerful workstations not basic hardware. The basic computer is going to struggle to run it. Let's say it uses 30% of it's resources just to run and spikes to 70% usage when you open anything else.

Put that half full glass of water next to the others. Definitely a big difference and you're going to know it.

Things like Lubunutu aren't designed to make powerful computers fast it's meant to make more basic hardware useable. The powerful computer is going to be fast no matter what and you probably want some of the features left out of an OS designed for pure efficiency.

Alpine Linux's storage requirements are measured in MBs. My router runs a version of Linux. Supercomputers run versions of Linux. Software should be matched to hardware and needs.

Hopefully this helps you!

you probably wouldn't notice any difference between kde and lxde in this case.

it's important to distinguish the distro and the desktop environment as two different things, lubuntu is just ubuntu with lxde installed.

You can’t get faster than instant- so if something is already instant, it wont improve. Also, 16GB ram isn’t exactly rocking the boat, workstations have 64-1024GB of ram these days.

No. Lubuntu is designed to use very little resources which makes it faster on slow hardware where the os is a lot of the load. If you have fast hardware, regular Ubuntu might use (making this up but the point generally stands) 2%CPU and 3G of RAM and lubuntu would use 1%CPU and 2G of RAM. That would be a much larger boost if you have a much weaker CPU and only 4G of RAM, but you likely wouldn't notice a difference on fast hardware.

Edit: spelling

probably melt

It will be so fast, you’ll see the results of your commands before you issue them.

You have to think in terms of bottleneck. If you have a really heavy desktop environment or operating system, then it can (and will) slow down older and weak computers. For those, it makes sense to install some special prepared environments, so it does not slow them down. If you have a modern and fast computer with plenty of resources, then it won't make a difference which you install.

In example, you have 16gb RAM, but your system uses only 4gb. Switching to a system that uses only 2gb won't get you any benefit, you have plenty of room that is unused. And for all other daily operations in the Window environment, lets say opening and closing windows with some effects and transparency, would lets say for fun require 1ghz of CPU to calculate without slowing the operation down. If you have a modern multicore CPU with 5ghz, then you don't win anything by installing a desktop environment or operating system that makes use of only 0.5ghz.

I run Gentoo /w 4TB NVME and 64GiB RAM, and I probably couldn't point at anything that's any faster than anybody else's setup.

Except I can run a bunch of JetBrains IDEs at the same time (power woo!).

The performance trend line would peak, and then go flat after a certain point. No matter how much hardware you add, the performance won't increase. Where that exact point is? 🤷‍♂️ Differs from distro to distro, I would think.

Not sure what you're definition of "powerful" is, but this friendica node, https://friendica.eskimo.com/ runs on an I9-10980xe (18 core / 36 thread) clocked at 4.5Ghz with 256GB of RAM, 29TB of raid 1 disk space (three RAID partitions, two nvme1G raided, and two partitions of two 14TB each raided). It runs great with 6.14 kernels. I was less satisfied with the task switching on earlier kernels, it typically runs with around 1000 processes. I run non-preemptive tickless kernels.

latest amd ryzen chip and with 4tb of ssd and 16gb of ram

Why would you call that "powerful"?