[ILUG] Suggestions for best 64 bit Linux distro?

[Colm Buckley]

On 22 Jun 2005, at 16:46, nadir at compsoc.nuigalway.ie wrote:

> you seem to be obsessed wiht fun-roll-loops, I think done properly  
> you can make your system faster, but yes maybe only 10 or so, Im no  
> fan of overclocking or anything myself, I use gentoo for the  
> following reasons.

It's nothing like 10%.  It might be 2-3%, but you're optimizing one  
component of the system at the expense of others.

> 1. Portage rules, the ebuilds often provide packages which just  
> work, they are preconfigured, tweaked, patched, I have found with  
> debian and ubuntu and especially rpm based distros, that the  
> package management gives u the package, plus all the pain of  
> sorting out conflicts etc, portage works, and damn well.

This is not true.  Ubuntu and Debian do *not* give you "the pain of  
sorting out conflicts"; they both have very strict rules on  
dependencies and version controls.  As for packages which "just  
work", I've yet to see any distro which pays more attention to  
sensible configuration than Debian's.  The dpkg-configure system  
allows for sensible defaults to be specified and per-site  
modifications to be made at package install time without necessarily  
editing the package's config files manually.

> Also the USE flag sustem is miles ahead of anything else out there,  
> the ability to configure specific support for applications without  
> having to wade through configure and make files is awesome. Time to  
> emerge world is fine , leave it go over night, problem solved.

"configure and make files"?  On a binary distribution?  I think not...

     Colm

-- 
Colm Buckley / colm at tuatha.org / +353 87 2469146