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

[John Knight]

There wouldn't be too much of a noticeable speed increase on an Athlon kind 
of machine, anything around 800Mhz (at a guess) and over won't be quite as 
notieable, but try running a binary built KDE 3 on a K62-350 and compare it 
to a source built one, bit of a difference. ;) MPlasyer has major difference 
though, provided the optmisation worked properly.

Make lunch, not war.

>
>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

_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail is now available on Australian mobile phones. Go to  
http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilecentral/signup.asp