On Wednesday 2 February 2005 21:48, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
Gentoo would appear to be an obvious choice. Of course, you have to endure the multi-day compiles, but you end up with nicely stripped and optimized binaries just for your system.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that it was proven scientifically that Gentoo optimized binaries are no more efficient than the generic 386 stuff distributed by other distributions. I think it had something to do with the 586 and 686 stuff having mostly to do with using MMX, SSE(1|2), and 3DNow! only in multimedia applications and since 386 labeled stuff can be built to use those 686 features if needed, the benefit to building everything -march=686 is negligible.
Personally, I think that the speed that people 'feel' in Gentoo is due in large part to building everything from scratch and -- by extention -- not throwing everything and the kitchen sink in to the start-up sequence as is done is many distributions. In Gentoo I might have had maybe 7 daemons running at all times where as in a fresh Debian install I might have 10 that I may or may not need (simply because after installing a server software, it's automatically added to boot). In RedHat or SuSE it would be in the order of maybe 12 daemons.
There is one area in which Gentoo can out-perform other distros: prelinking. Technically, though, it's experimental and doesn't always work. And it only helps on the start-up of applications.
Having said all that, I like Gentoo for it's bleeding edge flexibility; not it's speed.
My recommendation: A Debian variant like Ubuntu or Mepis with IceWM as your WM. The time you'll save on doing software updates is the major benefit here. Ubuntu comes with Synaptic which makes doing updates virtually a no-brainer. I'm not sure about Mepis.