[Sussex] Online with Ubuntu

[Geoffrey Teale]

Steve Dobson wrote:
> Performance isn't everything.  Your time spent in front of the system is
> far more important.  There are very few parts of the system that need
> to be compiled to their absolute limit for maximum performance.

Yup.

Again... no one is claiming that gentoo is going to make web surfing or 
word processing significantly faster (although games and videos may run 
a little smoother).

  ----%<-----

> My laptop is a 1.2GHz system that supports CPU freq scaling.  I've 
> enabled it ('cos it is their).  Most of the time it runs in slow mode
> and I really don't notice the difference.  About the only time I see it
> kick in is when I start a POVRay render.

This laptop (a 1.3Ghz Pentium M) runs at  600Mhz for the vast majority 
of the time without ill effects.

I agree totally with these points.

> If you pick a distro because it is "faster" then one of the others you
> better not be wasting all those extra CPU cycles you are getting doing
> silly things.

:-)  Agreed.

> I believe that to get the "maximum" performance from Gentoo you need 
> to compile everything.  Pre-compiled binaries are always a compromise
> so they can run on a wide number of hardware configurations,  but 
> these are optimised binaries, just not the best optimised for any 
> given system.  It took Geoff once (IIRC) three days to do a full level
> compilations of his Gentoo system (twin processes) thats 72 hours real
> time, and couldn't use the system while doing that.

That was an initial install from a stage 1 build.  Yes it was a long 
time, and not worth it  for most day to day uses.  As i've stated I 
don't run Gentoo on my boxes for precisely these kind of reasons.

> I'm not saying here "don't use Gentoo", far from it.  I'm just saying
> know what features in a distro are the ones that provide you with the
> most benefit, and selected your distro accordingly.

Absolutely.  I'll freely admit that the vast majority of people using 
Gentoo aren't really seeing massive performance gain.  They are however 
benfiting from a very powerful package management system in it's own 
right and from a a range of packages that covers very different ground 
to Debian.  I imagine a lot of people using gentoo are keen gamers, 
these people will be benefitting from the performance and the available 
packages which they won't be getting from the majority of other distros.

This whole discussion started with Thomas claiming that there were no 
real performance gains to be gained from a Gentoo system - that simply 
isn't true - the fact that those performance gains aren't of much use or 
your average business application user isn't the be all or end all of 
the arguement.

Ultimately we're agreeing here that different distros do different 
things well.

I will continue to argue the toss with anyone who puts down any distro 
with a flippant remark about what Debian can do.

-- 
Geoff Teale
Free Software Foundation <tealeg at member.fsf.org>