OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/21819/CrunchBang_Linux_Now_Has_64-Bit_Support_Boots_Faster Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:35:16 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Comment by marcp http://osnews.com/thread?373144 http://osnews.com/thread?373144 Words "Ubuntu" and "fast" shouldn't be placed in the same line. Ubuntu was and probobly always will be slow because of the system internals - mostly userland, package management and optimization. Fastes init scripts? sure, but an overal system performance is poor. Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (marcp) Comments RE: Comment by marcp http://osnews.com/thread?373147 http://osnews.com/thread?373147 What would you say is faster? Any mainstream distro or some niche one? All I've tried besides Ubuntu was OpenSuse and YAST is so slow it's not even funny. Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ventajou) Comments RE[2]: Comment by marcp http://osnews.com/thread?373167 http://osnews.com/thread?373167 Archlinux used to be pretty fast. I haven't used lately. I have 0.7 installed on an internal server, but haven't updated since it was setup. I don't think its a niche distro now, it probably was once long ago, but it seems to be becoming more and more popular. Its also built from mostly pure vanilla sources. Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (broken_symlink) Comments RE[3]: Comment by marcp http://osnews.com/thread?373171 http://osnews.com/thread?373171
Archlinux used to be pretty fast. I haven't used lately. I have 0.7 installed on an internal server, but haven't updated since it was setup. I don't think its a niche distro now, it probably was once long ago, but it seems to be becoming more and more popular. Its also built from mostly pure vanilla sources.


I love Arch, but I'd still consider it a niche distro. While it's popular, it is mostly popular with those already familiar with Linux and know what they're doing. It's one hell of a system when it's up and running, but getting it to that point requires knowledge of Linux and manual editing of conf files.
Of course, that is the point of Arch, to be as simple internally as possible, and it succeeds very much in doing that. But it's not end-user oriented.
Now, a LIve system based around Arch and GNOME that could be installed like Ubuntu, plus a few graphical tools, would, I think, end up become a mainstream distro in the end. But Arch as it is now will never be, and they don't really want it to be either.
This is no hate on Arch, it's my distro of choice. Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (darknexus) Comments RE[2]: Comment by marcp http://osnews.com/thread?373199 http://osnews.com/thread?373199 On the ooposite side (Arch -> mainstream, Gentoo -> niche), I really love how Gentoo is fast. The advantages of pure source distribution seem to fade over time as binary distro are more and more stable, but I still love it. Some years ago, updating a system with multiple repository sources was a symlink/incompatible ABI nightmare, but now major repository have almost all packages and ensure inter-compatibility. Gentoo never had those problem as packages were compiled to work with existing one, but anyway, that's off-topic.

You can't really compare "install then use" distributions like Ubuntu or Mandriva with DIY and "keep it minimal and let user somplete it" distro like Arch or Gentoo. The two former one will always react faster, but until the user decide to "bloat" them with advanced power management feature, HAL, [a-zA-Z]*Kit and other daemon, they will lack the "mainstream polish" that install and use distribution add to the experience. Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Elv13) Comments RE: Comment by marcp http://osnews.com/thread?373238 http://osnews.com/thread?373238
Words "Ubuntu" and "fast" shouldn't be placed in the same line.


And you have of course verified that this is true for Crunch. Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Soulbender) Comments Comment by marcp http://osnews.com/thread?373290 http://osnews.com/thread?373290 I personaly think that CRUX and Arch linux do the trick. Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (marcp) Comments