Is Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu?

[Walter Dnes]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 07:07:37PM +0000, Christopher Browne wrote

> Unfortunately, the nearest thing that happened was that Gentoo
> emerged...

  GROAN!!!

> ...and popularized twiddling with optimizer flags as indicating
> that you "understand your system."

  I run Gentoo, and I don't make that claim.  It's more valid for LFS
(Linux From Scratch).  Gentoo allows the end user a lot of control,
including optimization, over the builds *WITHOUT* being a super geek.

* I am not a C programmer.  I haven't got a clue about makefiles, let
  alone manually building a complex program.  "emerge" is a black box to
  me just like "rpm" and "apt-get" for Redhat and Debian.

* For compiler flags,
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=native -mfpmath=sse -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
can't be beat for speed.  Anybody who insists on -O3 or -O9 gets laughed
at in the Gentoo forums, and their bug reports aren't accepted.

* The USE variable, along with /etc/package.mask has allowed me to avoid
  being afflicted with crud like JAVA, PAM, HAL, and DBUS.  This isn't
  about being a ricer; it's about having a system without a gazillion
  gigabytes of extra dependancies.  There is a lot less running to break.
  One side-effect of having less garbage in memory is that programs run
  faster, which is nice, but it's an additional bonus, not the main goal.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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