Is Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu?

[grigi]

http://funroll-loops.info/

http://software.intel.com/en-us/arti...c-for-the-mid/

At the bottom. Read and weep.

[MrNatewood]

You'll find that, as a gamer, you want to be able to Alt-Tab out of your game if you are getting pwned (read = dead, wait for the next round), or not and go afk, so you can quickly check what server IP's are, or in a MMORPG you might want to check some world map with a lot of useful info. Maybe you are playing a game and you want to see how to max out your kills so what strats to use and whatever, leaderboards...

Are you saying you can Alt-TAB a fullscreen game in either metacity or compiz?
How do you do that?

[Ragas]

Arch does you only make feel you have more control over the system, because you have to start from scratch. "Normal" distributions are full-fledged, after installation. So first you don't have a choice but you can customize the installation afterwards.

That is the only difference between Ubuntu and Arch.

ever tried do deinstall Empathy from Gnome?! ever tried to just install gnome-sound-recorder ........

p.s. I actually happen to like gnome-sound-recorder somehow

[Ragas]

I ran Gentoo for a year then one day just said enough is enough.

It all comes down to what you use your computer for, and how much time/effort/bandwidth you are willing to spend just maintaining it. This month I am using Ubuntu, but it is getting boring because nothing goes wrong. Ha

I'm using Gentoo since some jears now and I've come to a point where everything more or less just works. I've written scripts to uptate my system on a more or less dayly basis i would just need to configure ancron to automatically run this script and there wouldn't be much to do anymore.
Sometimes some big update like gnome breaks something .. but thats rare and likely fixes its self two updates later if I don't interfere.

so the thing is after a fair amount of time Gentoo for me just happens to work.
Where on Ubuntu Installs I always have the Problem that more and more breaks gets worse with version updates so that after fighting with apt and some wierd 'ghost-Programms' I tend to clean the machine completely and reinstall. (you wont see that after using it just for a month, but after one or two jears)
I don't know maybe I'm just plain stupid for Ubuntu or play too much.


Next thing I'll try is LFS ... but I think for the longrun this will not be maintainable.

[Ragas]

think your girfriend will kill you... Is it really worth it for a 10-20% speedup?

since she's complaining about the performance and I want that to stop It might be.
I've been thinking about just replacing core components of Ubuntu with some custom build ones .... don't know if that will work.
other option is to add more RAM .... which would include to physically completely disassemble the netbook don't know which one is better.

For me both would be fun but the killing holds me back ... a little ...

[V!NCENT]

Are you saying you can Alt-TAB a fullscreen game in either metacity or compiz?
How do you do that?

Desktop cube? I don't know... I use Kwin...

[mirv]

I don't have any problems maintaining a Gentoo installation; I've been upgrading the same one since 2006 across drives and file systems. On the other hand, I found it more difficult to customise Ubuntu to how I wanted it, and ended up switching to Gentoo on that machine too (and as a bonus, compiled xbmc from source runs much smoother).
This doesn't make Ubuntu worse than Gentoo - it simply means that I find Gentoo easier to use for my purposes.
Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, they're all aimed at different crowds.

[Apopas]

Ah yes, but in my case gentoo wasn't any faster at all. In fact I think even after using gentoo for a whole year, I realised it was slower. It was all in my head that compiling everything == faster. Let someone else worry about compiling the system and optimising it. Then I can just use the OS for what I want.

After 6 continual years Gentoo user and countless of benchmarks with PTS and manual ones. I can confirm that in most cases it's the fastest OS in the world. Just use sane GCC flags and your systems shines.

[Kano]

@mirv

To compile xbmc from source you don't need gentoo at all. I worte a few scripts to compile it in the home - different branches/revisions. That works with every distro where the build-deps are installed - incl. Debian or Ubuntu. Stupid argument...

[b15hop]

@b15shop

If you don't know that it is possible to let other machine compile code for another in Gentoo then you should ask yourself what have you learned for that whole year if i using gentoo second month already know that and many more. Too much optimization will actually hurt performance and don't tell me crap that i don't gain performance. I am using a netbook and needed source based distro to squeeze every bit out of it to actually normally work and i will tell you, Ubuntu is a cow, a big fat cow, even Ubuntu's Gnome which is supposedly memory usage friendlier was heavier than my KDE on Gentoo. And because all applications are exactly suited for my exact CPU IT IS running faster.

Of course I know that. Why do you think I was talking about cflags in the first place. To compile for another machine, just make the compiler target another architecture. I've even got most of the way through a LFS install a few times... I didn't enjoy linux from scratch because in the end I realise using an OS that needs more work to everything which is just counter productive. So it would be right to say Gentoo is moderately difficult but LFS is truly hard core.

I stick to arch for the same reason you stick to gentoo. Back when I only had 512MB of ram, Arch made my PC feel fast. Ubuntu was just bloated to hell and fvwm + arch meant that I could still watch 720p video with no stutter. Windows XP couldn't even do that.