[plug] Gentoo vs Debian

[Cameron Patrick]

G'day!

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 10:13:13AM +0800, Jan Hurst wrote:

| i am considering switching to a binary distribution and using something
| like debian. i understand debians packages are updated quite frequently
| but at least i wont have to recompile mozilla every other week (for
| example... it takes AGES).

I switched from Gentoo back to Debian around the start of the year after
I was sick of having to recompile everything, plus emerge managed to
break my KDE installation to an extent that I couldn't be bothered
fixing it, as well as being sick of XFS causing data loss (not Gentoo's
fault, but fixing would require a re-install).  Debian seems, to me at
least, a lot less messy than Gentoo, although you'll miss out on some of
the not-quite-Free software like Nvidia binary drivers and Acrobat and
such being pre-packaged for you.

| one of the "selling points" of gentoo is that by compiling (and
| optimising) packages a large speed increase is gained. i dont know how
| accurate this is but i am interested in getting some opinions. does
| debian have 686 (P4)optimised binary packages? will i notice a speed
| difference? are the gentoo claims of massive performance increases truth
| or myth? (gentoo certainly seems faster than any other distro ive
| used... but that is hardly from any real testing ;)

There is a significant difference between optimised code and
un-optimised code; but since every distribution compiles with
optimisation on that isn't an issue.  CPU-specific optimisations /can/
make a difference for raw computational stuff (~10-20%) but I didn't
notice any subjective differences in responsiveness or anything.  One
thing that you may be noticing is the Gentoo patched kernel containing
low-latency scheduling and kernel pre-empting patches which I never
really tried - but ISTR Tony Breeds thought that they made a difference
in 2.5.x and he's more of a kernel expert than I.

HTH,

Cameron.