Gentoo Vs. other distros

zeek · Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 6:21 am Post subject:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-647459.html

Posted here that ISC (group behind BIND) found Gentoo to be the fastest OS for running a DNS server.

micr0c0sm · Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 1:13 pm Post subject:

steveL · Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 12:45 am Post subject:

kicker69101 · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 62

I have been every happy on how gentoo compares to other distros. I have noticed that gentoo is generally faster then all the other distros out there, but if you build your system right its the most stable I have seen to date. I just don't see all those small problems that I seem to run into with other distros (ie screen saver issues with ubuntu on a quad monitor setup). Its always been a lean, clean, mean machine for me.
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d2_racing · Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 12:14 pm Post subject:

karsten_s · Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 2:29 am Post subject:

I actually call my gentoo box a 'linux with migrational background.' I had gentoo for a year on an AMD Duron 700 - and it was the fastest performance that computer ever had. only problem was the somewhat decreasing (in spite of PORTAGE_NICENESS) performance while doing upgrades, which sometimes took days.

then i got a shiny new athlon64 x2 and you bet i put gentoo on there. sometime last summer i found out about sabayon and thought, what the heck, gentoo-based click-and-run distro that even ships with beryl? me likes - and fell hard within the first week. forget about upgradability. it didn't take long before i declared mke2fs -j on my root partition - and in a celebratory mood, too.

just last week-end i ran into some dynamic linking problems i couldn't figure out. emerge -e system && emerge -e world completed in under 24hrs - all the while i was using whatever programs were working. what other OS can you completely reinstall WHILE working on it? The simplest Windoze installation takes at least six reboots...

whatever - i have had different OSes on this machine (different flavors of windows, even vista - ugh!) and gentoo definitely is my way of choice!
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d2_racing · Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 1:20 pm Post subject:

But doing this, if a new profile is out, you will be behind the official profile and also, certains package will not be updated because, they are only present inside a specific profile.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 10:37 pm Post subject:

A big thanks to everyone who has replied thus far. I think the results are clear. Most Gentoo users feel it is the way to go if you want speed, configurability, and stability. That sort of goes without saying, though. If it weren't so, we'd all be using another distro.

While I was drawn to Gentoo out of extreme curiosity, and by the driving force of my inner geek, I stay because Gentoo is simply better all around. I have also used PHLAK, Fedora (eww), Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu and it's derivatives, and a few others. I found them all wanting in some way.

PHLAK, while pretty, is a hacked together piece of trash. Fedora was so unstable, I removed it from my hard drive faster than it installed. Debian, while both stable and well supported software-wise had far too many package subdivisions. Installing samba required three or four packages (I forgot). Trying to get ntfs3g support forced me to move out of etch, and move towards it's less stable brethren. Slackware, while it was my favorite for quite some time, tended to be cumbersome to work with when you dared to install something that wasn't native to the distro. While that taught me the wonder of compiling, it made for true pain in the neck status spending half my day chasing down one missing dependency after another. Ubuntu, while quite pretty from boot to shutdown, didn't allow me to be the root user. Not a good thing. I want to tell my computer what to do, not have it tell ME what to do. I already have an OS installed that does that, it's called Windoze XP.

And then I tried Gentoo.

Gentoo can be made as pretty, or as boring as *you* wish. Gentoo can have as much, or as little software installed as *you* desire. As far as I can see, it is THE OS for those who wish to blaze their own Linux path, like yours truly.

Gentoo users also don't seem to be hung up on cults of personality with its creators, unlike Slackware. From my experience, Slackware and its forum are a cult of personality made to worship Pat Volkerding, and a few others that dominate said forum. Anyone who has an opinion that runs counter to the accepted Slackware "norm" is either ignored, or flamed to within inches of their lives. And while it's not everyone on the forum that does this, there are far too many twits there who delight in being rude, just because they can be. Not for me...no thanks!

But that is beside the point, as I am sure some will say. So let me get back to the point.

I realize that when someone owns the newest chip/mobo combo, and uses the fastest hard drives they can find, there is truly going to be little discernible difference in the speed of the operating system and the programs supported. After all , there are systems out there that run Windoze Blister with blinding speed. If they can run Blister quickly, it stands to reason they'll run any OS quickly.

However, when you have a system that is sitting somewhere between functional and fossil, the OS can make a significant difference in overall operation. And that is my experience with Gentoo. It made my PII450 run faster. It made my old laptop run fast enough to play a DVD without dropping frames; something that Slackware didn't do, even after tweaking it.

There are many reasons to delight in the wonder of Gentoo. Be it configurability, speed, software choices, having the packages find their own dependencies, or stability, there are numerous reasons to make the choice to be a Gentoo head. There may well be a faster, more configurable, better supported Linux distro out there. As of yet, I haven't found it. For me, Gentoo is without equal. The time it takes to install it is more than worth the effort considering the final results.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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SLBMEH · Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 7:52 am Post subject:

It's hard to tell... I started on Slackware 3.5 back in 1997 on a 386 machine... Used that same machine to install gentoo linux 1.0 back in may of 2002 I believe... It was the most painful install I've ever had to go through, but the results were worth it back then. I was so pleased I put gentoo on all of my machines... I would imagine the difference is much less now that everything is pretty much built for 586 nptl or better...
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pappy_mcfae · Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 8:26 am Post subject:

Slackware was also the first distro I ever tried. I got a hold of the Info-Magic CD with Slackware, Debian, and Red Hat (when it was free). The date on the disk is October of 94. I tried all three, and Slackware was the only one that would even try to work with my CDROM drive (SB16 proprietary interface). Red Hat refused to work with it, and Debian only worked when I tried to install it. Slackware would allow it to work after install, but only once. That was enough to install it.

It was installed on a 486 SX33 with a co-processor, 32 Megs of ram and an ATI mach32 VLB video card. That was my first experience with anything other than Windows 3.11 and DOS. I eventually lost interest in Slackware for many reasons. The most compelling was lack of internet access. I forgot about Linux completely until a couple years ago when a friend came over with his laptop. It had PHLAK 0.21 installed.

After that, the Linux bug bit me again. And now that I had DSL, the only reason I lost interest in Linux was gone.

I eventually found my way to Gentoo, and haven't looked back. What other distro can allow you to update it daily, and reinstall everything while you are still using the machine? It meets my needs, and really pepped up the old laptop, and even the PII450 server next to my foot.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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yejun · n00b Joined: 21 Jan 2004 Posts: 6

Archlinux is just as fast as gentoo, but their init and package systems are really primitive.

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

Gentoo is a LOT bigger than the Slackware install I used to use.

I used Slackware as a very bare-bones base, and was hand-compiling everything on top of that so performance-wise I don't think Gentoo is much better. (It's probably worse, but that's because applications have bulked up so much. The old system was an AMD K6III-400 with 512MB RAM; This system is an under-clocked Opteron 180 with 3GB RAM!!)

Doing stuff with Gentoo is a LOT faster 'tho.
Hand compiling stuff gives the greatest freedom by far for optimization and pick'n'choosing, but Portage makes it maintainable.

The older parts of my Gentoo system are pretty bloated, as I didn't know how to hack the ebuilds back then and thus was forced to go with all the dependency decisions of whatever crazy package maintainer was looking after that particular package. (PHP4 was particularly scary...)

But now that I have learned, I can tweak them and thus have the advantages of 'rolling-my-own', but also of having a maintainable package system! \o/

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

Hypnos · Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 6:02 am Post subject:

Way back when I cared about tweaking for performance I found some minor gains using exotic {C,LD}FLAGS. But it wasn't worth the breakage it caused with certain packages.

I stick with Gentoo because it is home. Other distros are like living in hotels -- comfortable initially, but ultimately confining.
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Diezel · Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 8:33 am Post subject:

I've always been an OS freak and I tend to try out a lot of distros. The only one I always keep coming back to is my Gentoo install. At work we use some RedHat and a lot of CentOS but my desktop there runs Gentoo and at home I have, Gentoo and Ubuntu. Ubuntu is just as fast for me, but when I got into linux a long time ago I searched for something I could use full time. So I could ditch Windows. I found Gentoo and I put down a lot of time to learn how it works. After I did that, nothing seems as good. I find it overall the best and most clear distro out there. When you learn where to find everything and how to change it to your likings the only more configurable might be LFS but it's way to much work to maintain.
I can get all my work done with Gentoo and so far every time I find a new program on the net I want to use there is an ebuild for it. There is no way I'd ever ditch the first love I had with Linux.
Besides, and average install with Gentoo takes about 6 hours and I've got my gnome up and running. The last time I did this was last week when I got my new desktop to work. I did the basics in a few hours in the afternoon, and the rest from home.

Diezel · Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 8:47 am Post subject:

alien · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Nov 2002 Posts: 85

karsten_s · Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 8:55 am Post subject:

Hypnos · Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 9:13 am Post subject:

karsten_s · Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 9:56 am Post subject:

thank you. it's done.

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durian · Guru Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 312 Location: Margretetorp

Never noticed any difference because I never compared two distro's on the same hardware. My current gentoo machine has had gentoo on it since I built it and switched it on, two and a half years ago.

-peter

Sprotte · Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 8:26 pm Post subject:

Gentoo boots and shuts down dog-slow.

Package stuff is also rather slow (searching, syncing etc.)

The installed system's performance is rather nice, though. Which doesn't have too much to do with Gentoo. Thus, it's a mixed bag.

ugus · Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:16 pm Post subject:

I have a feeling that Arch linux is faster than Gentoo...
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lightvhawk0 · Guru Joined: 07 Nov 2003 Posts: 388

Simply put I tried lots of distros; when things would break in binary distros, it would be hard trying to find scripts, config files, logs etc...

Gentoo on the other hand is made to be configured by hand from the beginning. so when something crashes and pukes up a bunch of data I know where do find and how to deal with it.
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