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Measuring The Benefits Of The Gentoo Approach
An anonymous reader writes "We're constantly hearing how the source based nature of the Gentoo distro makes better use of your hardware, but no-one seems to have really tested it. What kind of gains are involved over distros which use binary packaging? The article is here."
LFS from scratch is my distro of choice :-)
I have never tried Gentoo but I ran FreeBSD for a while. With FreeBSD you have source for the whole system as well as for any "ports" you install. There are procedures for doing a "make world" that recompiles all of it. You can get the source changes to go to the next version and with a bit of chicken and egg stuff about compilers if that has changed, you can compile yourself the upgrade.
I ended up bagging it because there is a fair amount of stuff for Linux that is missing in BSDs (or I wasn't willing to expend the effort to get to run through compatibility mode). Java, Flash, etc. no flames please, I know some people work these things out - I just got tired of the hassles with it when I could rpm/apt-get it with Linux.
I thought the FreeBSD was really high quality though.
Is Gentoo a similiar model? Has someone used both?
the gentoo-sources kernel is not a stock kernel. It is highly patched. Vanilla-sources is the stock kernel. I've compiled both and vanilla is much quicker.
Time makes more converts than reason
This is a bit off-topic, but...
The really disturbing thing is that the best time for opening a 32,000 line spreadsheet in Gnumeric was over seven minutes.
This is a perfect example of why, as much as I would like it to be otherwise, I can neither switch entirely to Linux nor recommend others to do so either if they are dependent on any kind of office suite. Excel performs the same task (okay, a bigger task -- my largest spreadsheet is some 59,000 lines) in well under thirty seconds. Open Office runs much more slowly than MS Office on the same hardware and is completely unusable on some hardware that supports MS Office just fine. AbiWord can take thirty minutes just to change the screen scaling with a large document -- MS Word does this almost instantly.
Please don't get me wrong or think I'm a big Microsoft fan. I detest Microsoft, and I've been waiting for Free Software to save me ever since I started using Linux daily in the mid-90's. Common end-user application developers for Linux seem not to use their own products very much or else test them on the latest and greatest hardware. The open source feature set has made great strides since I started using Linux, but the performance of open source office software frankly sucks horribly compared to Microsoft's offerings. This is especially depressing since you'd almost have to try to write software that wastes more CPU cycles and memory than MS software. It doesn't seem to be getting any better, either.
It's not Windows 98 and Office 97 that are too bloated and inefficient for my 1996 IBM Thinkpad with a 120MHz Pentium and 40 megs of RAM -- it's X and Open Office that bring it to its knees. Sure, I could spend a wad of cash to upgrade my hardware so it could handle Open Office, but that's missing the point. OSS is supposed to be more efficient, not less. For myself, this is a much bigger barrier to full adoption than feature parity, which is not a significant issue anymore.
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