How fast is gentoo?

[AutoBot]

I'm with everyone else, most applications run with a noticeable speed increase compared to other distributions.

Now games are a different story, on Windows XP Return To Castle Wolfenstein is un-playable but in gentoo my fps range from 80fps inside to probably something like 40fps outside where alot of things are being rendered. Counter-Strike running on wine averages 75fps running in a 1024x768 window on my 1280x1024 desktop. Those numbers are coming from sub-par OEM hardware except for my GeForce II MX 400 which is also quickly becoming outdated.

Now the short version:

If your capable of running / maintaining gentoo, I can say without doubt you will enjoy the hell out of it.
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[Curious]

[sibn]

emacs

Happy now?
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[TomorrowPlusX]

Reading the comment from the fella who was concerned that 2 seconds wasted loading time for konq would add up to a loss of something line 23 minutes over the week always make me giggle.

I've been using KDE since 1.something and yeah, sure it's slow. But it also works great, and has great programming APIs. If all you do, all day long, is restart your desktop over and over, then by all means go over to fluxbox or even twm. Those start quickly enough. But I'd also suggest a therapist.

But on the other hand, if you actually (shudder) do work on your machine, you probably start a few programs and then run them all day long... and then what matters is not how quickly the programs start but how *well* they run.

In my experience KDE programs run quite well, and are fairly stable. Mozilla crashes more often than konq for me [note: for me, YMMV]; my main prgram usage is KDevelop, Konsole and, well, my own programs. KDevelop is a dream, as is konsole. I don't care if KDevelop takes 4 second to start, even though anjunta (which as far as I know is great) might start in 2. Once kdevelop is running, it's fantastic. Same with Konq -- I start it to browse QT documentation, and sure, it takes 1 or 2 seconds to start, but once it's open, it's open for about 4 hours at least. And it runs great. In my experience, KDevelop hasn't crashed on me since the old kde 3.0 beta days, months ago.

And for reference, I'm working on a project with about 20,000 lines of code, and I tend to work on it in 4 to 5 hour stretches. Note, I start KDevelop *once* then *use* it.

Really, I get so exasperated by all this hoohaa about how slow KDE & its programs start. We should be arguing about usability, reliability, and aesthetics.

Come on, everybody. :!:

[squanto]

I have Gentoo on my 1400Mhz Athlon, which it performs slightly better than redhat on, starts up few seconds faster and kde goes somewhat faster, get about the same frame rates on RTCW and UT and quake3.
My 900Mhz laptop goes pretty well, starts up fully into kde in about a minute and 20 seconds, from cold boot to logged in as user (kicks winblows 2k's butt on my lappy).
My P166 boots about 2 minutes faster with gentoo than with redhat. Same services running (apache, ssh, nfs, samba, cups, and few others)

[Sivar]

[cirad]

@sibn:
"for me, gentoo is about 1200Mhz, and gets about 2,390 bogomips."

On IA32 (Celeron/PentiumX, Duron/TB/XP) bogomips are MHz * 2. It says nothing about performance.

[AutoBot]

[squanto]

I am not at school anymore so I only have internet at work, so no more playing with Gentoo this summer, but I was using a wine build from april, (not sure of exact build #) and updated to 1.4 of CS, I have the retail CS + HL cd. When I would try to enter game it would crash. I had my settings set up correctly cause I was able to play 1.3 fine, but not 1.4. I guess I will have to try again once I get back to school in August.
Any tips to get it working though would be cool.

Thanks,
Andrew

[sleazyrob]

I have noticed a very noticable speed improvment over my previous Debian binary distribution. Lets not forget why gentoo should be faster than binary distributions such as RedHat, Mandrake etc...

Everything Compiled from Source and Optimised
Everything is compiled specifically for your type of processor, (if you set the opts correctly). In binary distributions, most packages are pre-compiled for 586 or even 386 for maximum compatibility this means they don't use any of the many speed optimisations available for specific types of processors.

Custom Kernel
The installation involves the user building their own kernel, meaning they will compile in support for the devices they require and nothing else. This is faster than modules and saves a huge amount of boot time while devices are detected. Obviously this can be achived with any distro, but a large number of RedHat users will never do this.

Only required/requested packages are installed
Most users don't need most of the services which are commonly installed with RedHat - these eat CPU cycles, memory etc and boot time. Most of this - such as kudzu - are to ease administration for novice users so that stuff 'just works'.

My machine is AMD Athlon XP 1900(+) 512MB DDR.
I also have a Sun Ultra 1 running Solaris. I might try gentoo at some point on that (I'll take a weeks holiday while I emerge X, gnome and openoffice).

Rob
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Robert N Wood
rob@rnwood.co.uk

[klieber]

OK folks -- this topic has been discussed thoroughly. Locking it now.

--kurt
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