[ILUG] Suggestions for best 64 bit Linux distro?

[Vishal Vatsa]

On Wed 22 Jun 2005 16:46, nadir at compsoc.nuigalway.ie wrote:
> you seem to be obsessed wiht fun-roll-loops, I think done properly you can
> make your system faster, but yes maybe only 10  or so, Im no fan of
> overclocking or anything myself, I use gentoo for the following reasons.
>
> 1. Portage rules, the ebuilds often provide packages which just work, they
> are pre configured, tweaked, patched, I have found with debian and ubuntu
> and especially rpm based distros, that the package management gives u the
> package, plus all the pain of sorting out conflicts etc, portage works, and
> damn well. Also the USE flag sustem is miles ahead of anything else out
> there, the ability to configure specific support for applications without
> having to wade through configure and make files is awesome. Time to emerge
> world is fine , leave it go over night, problem solved.
Leaving the performance boost issue alone (I don't want to argue about it, it 
is different from system to system).  Also I am not a big fan of RPM based 
systems also (too much personal trauma in my early years).  

I used Gentoo for about 1.5 years on my home system and always used debian in 
work. So from personal experience I can say that your point about portage and 
USE flags being miles ahead are not fine, yes the portage system is good, so 
is dpkg. I don't remember the last time I had to wade through make files for 
my debian desktop.

I guess you have nice bit of hardware if you can emerge world over night. The 
main problem I had with portage was the number of times I had to go in and 
edit an ebuild file to make stuff work. I have never fiddled with an deb file 
ever, unless I am making my own debs. 
> 2. Documentation, I have yet to see better documentation, better wiki and
> better forums.
Yes the Gentoo community are nice and help full, mostly muppet free.
> 3. Community, yes I like them, there are less lamers who try to beat down
> other distros.
Yes they do, I remember a hole thing about how Debian was losing users to 
Gentoo.

> Quoting Colm Buckley <colm at tuatha.org>:
> > On 22 Jun 2005, at 16:18, Vishal Vatsa wrote:
> > > Also most people don't want to spend like a couple of days of
> > > setting up the system for 10-20% boost. Its just not worth the
> > > compile time if don't have the latest and greatest CPU. And if you
> > > do then do you really care about 10% boost?
> >
> > 10-20% is *extremely* unlikely.  It might be plausible if you were
> > running i386 code on a P4, but not when using funroll-loops etc
> > against stock -O2 on x86-64.
> >
> > Also note that most of the recommended Gentoo optimisations such as
> > funroll-all-loops are optimising CPU usage against disk and RAM
> > usage.  On most modern systems, where the CPU is very fast and RAM
> > and disk slower, this will lead to *decreased* system performance.
> >
> > You also have to set the time spent compiling against potential
> > savings in runtime; most Gentoo packages seem to version-up every
> > couple of days, so there's virtually no chance that the (theoretical)
> > runtime gains will stack up against the time spent compiling.
> >
> >      Colm
> >
> > --
> > Colm Buckley / colm at tuatha.org / +353 87 2469146
> >
> >
> > --
> > Irish Linux Users' Group
> > http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/

-- 
Vishal Vatsa
Dept. of Computer Sc.
NUI Maynooth.
Public Key:
http://www.minds.nuim.ie/~wish/vishal.pub