Gentoo performance benchmarked

[Thomas Milne]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Giles Orr <gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 2009/10/31 Rajinder Yadav <devguy.ca-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>:
>> Jason Carson wrote:
>>> "Gentoo did out-perform Ubuntu in almost every test, and sometimes by a
>>> fair margin. It does appear that optimizing for a specific CPU can yield a
>>> decent performance increase...The question is whether the amount of time
>>> it takes is worth the benefit, and that’s a personal choice."
>>
>> I gave up on Slackware Linux because I didn't want to tinker around with my
>> Linux box, I want to use my Linux box as a tool to get other things done. I
>> would think many more are in this camp. I perceive Gentoo far more of an
>> annoyance than Slackware, but I might be wrong. I would also think far more
>> people care about easy of use Vs customized performance boost.
>>
>> Personally I love Ubuntu and Debian because it makes my Linux life simple
>> and easy. There have been a few things I've built from source, but for the
>> most part I don't usually need to build from source.
>>
>> If you start thinking in terms of cost/value, and what your time is really
>> worth, then the choice is obvious, go with Ubuntu or Debain.
>
> I'm in the same "camp" as you, ie. I think Debian is easiest to work
> with and constitutes the best use of my time - but it's worth
> remembering that we're all on this mailing list because we adhere to a
> different set of values than the majority of the population.  Most of
> the world (either by choice or inertia) think that Windows is the
> answer when you look at the cost/value equation.  So Linux users are
> outliers on the graph of computer users.  And Gentoo users are
> outliers on the graph of Linux users.  But what constitutes "cost" and
> what constitutes "value" is actually a very personal question: I've
> always had a fascination and respect for Gentoo, and for Jason it
> offers a lot of value.  For me, patches and upgrades take too long on
> Gentoo, but for him it's an acceptable cost - in part because he gets
> Portage, arguably one of the best package management systems available
> for Linux.  (Apologies to Jason for possibly putting words in his
> mouth.)  It's the right answer for him: and personally, I'm glad to
> have people using a wide variety of distros on this list.
>
>>> I've been using Gentoo for several years now. I was initially drawn to it
>>> because I thought it would outperform other distributions but for what I
>>> use it for the optimizations make little, probably not even noticeable,
>>> differences but I stuck with Gentoo because I like Portage (The package
>>> management system).
>
I hate to admit it, but for me the changes in my priorities have come
with age. I used to enjoy spending many hours putting together a
highly personalized system, configuring everything for maximum speed.
After a while, though, I found that I was spending more time putting
things together than I was actually using them, and with two children
and more responsibilities, well, you know.

Now I use Debian, and I'm mostly happy with whatever the Gnome desktop
wants to do. Someone once told me that Debian is for 'old farts'. I
think I'm comfortable with that now ;)

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