[ILUG] Suggestions for best 64 bit Linux distro?

[Kevin Philp]

I think you have summed up Gentoo very well. Its excellent because of Portage 
and the documentation, not because of optimisations. It handles dependencies 
well and upgrading can be a continuous process rather than a huge jump from 
distro X.Y to X.Y+1

I run mainly on the x86 stable set but have a few packages running on the 
unstable branch...just for fun. Compiling your own packages is not a big deal 
unless its KDE (hours!). Some big packages such as OpenOffice also come in 
precompilied binary formats - just look for OpenOffice-bin so you don't have 
to compile everything. 

On the other hand I live in fear of upgrading our Mandrake boxes... something 
always seems to break. 

A first Gentoo installation can be hard compared to other distro's (print the 
manual and follow it carefully) but when it up its very easy to maintain.

Kevin.

On Wednesday 22 June 2005 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.

1. Portage rules, the ebuilds often provide packages which just work, they
 are pre configured, 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. 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.
2. Documentation, I have yet to see better documentation, better wiki and
 better forums.
3. Community, yes I like them, there are less lamers who try to beat down
 other distros.

Quoting Colm Buckley <colm at tuatha.org>:
> On 22 Jun 2005, at 16:18, Vishal Vatsa wrote:
> > Also most people don't want to spend like a couple of days of
> > setting up the system for 10-20% boost. Its just not worth the
> > compile time if don't have the latest and greatest CPU. And if you
> > do then do you really care about 10% boost?
>
> 10-20% is *extremely* unlikely.  It might be plausible if you were
> running i386 code on a P4, but not when using funroll-loops etc
> against stock -O2 on x86-64.
>
> Also note that most of the recommended Gentoo optimisations such as
> funroll-all-loops are optimising CPU usage against disk and RAM
> usage.  On most modern systems, where the CPU is very fast and RAM
> and disk slower, this will lead to *decreased* system performance.
>
> You also have to set the time spent compiling against potential
> savings in runtime; most Gentoo packages seem to version-up every
> couple of days, so there's virtually no chance that the (theoretical)
> runtime gains will stack up against the time spent compiling.
>
>      Colm
>
> --
> Colm Buckley / colm at tuatha.org / +353 87 2469146
>
>
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> Irish Linux Users' Group
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