[plug] Gentoo vs [insert ur fav distro here]

[William Kenworthy]

I wouldnt call gentoo having a "great" speed increase over Mandrake (586
binary on an athlon t-bird) - but it is there.

Gentoo has three main advantages that are perhaps more meaningful than
raw speed:

stability - yes even if bleeding edge in many things, it still manages
to be more stable than Mandrake.  I put this down to compiling in place,
with the correct options, and not being tied to lowest common
denominator settings, though I have stayed away from the testing tree in
most cases.

bleeding edgness - one system started out as gcc2.95, is now gcc3.2
including latest stable glibc etc.  Generally good, but with a compile
time of 5-6 days for open office on a cyrix 200 machine, being able to
keep up with too many new packages means its often compiling for days at
a time!  ccache and distcc in a small network help, but with some
packages such as OO I am currently having "issues" with distcc!  So
basicly the 6 month Mandrake wipe disk and upgrade, or upgrade install
and spend next 6 months trying to fix serious "issues" "largely" goes
away

security updates are prompt, and updates for main packages are fast,
without many of the problems trying to shoehorn a later package into a
binary distro brings.

Downside is there have been some severe breakages let through by the
slack QA on the portage system at times ... but this is generally able
to be handled by managing the upgrades sensibly.

BillK

On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 12:32, John Knight wrote:
> Yes, there would be a big speed increase, especially within KDE etc. The 
> main area of speed increase that you're after though is areas like MPlayer, 
> compiled frmo source, MPlayer is grooooovy. :-)
> 
> Make lunch, not war.
> 
> >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 ;)
> >
> >any comments or suggestions would be muchly appreciated.
> >
> >-jan
> >
> 
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-- 
William Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au>