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recommendation: sabayon linux

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Stoic Joker:
Well at this point, in a choice between sabayon & Slackware, Slackware wins. At least it would give meaningful error messages that could be analyzed, addressed, resolved, and allowed me to get to a desktop (so I had a point to work from). I rather dislike guessing games.

Only problems I have with the Slackware 12 install is shutdown is frequently just a scheduled crash and the sound does not work. I'm not adverse to *nix, I just don't think it's ready for prime-time desktop-wise that is. I really don't have the time or patience to dedicate my life to finding out how to make a hardware change smoothly because somebody thinks it's a H00T to have to re-write parts of the OS every time the neighbors cat blinks.

So.. At this point I'm going to torch the sabayon experiment & take a stab at f0dder's Arch suggestion.

Shades:
Shades: the speed advantage of compiling-for-your-architecture of gentoo hasn't been very large in my experience - and iirc there were some benchmarks showing that for some people (and some compiler options) the system even got slightly slower than "vanilla" binaries. Kinda makes sense, most applications aren't CPU-heavy and thus don't benefit from aggressive optimizations; au contraire, some of those bloat up the binaries, so you end up with fatter and ever-so-slighty slower-loading more-memory-consuming without much advantage.

I use gentoo on my server, though - I like the level of control it gives me over what dependencies are pulled in. Vanilla binaries tend to be built with all options supported - this often includes (optional) X11 support... I don't need and don't want X11 on my server, and gentoo let's me achieve this.

For the desktop, I prefer something smoother and more polished... but that's why I don't run Linux on the desktop in the first place :P
-f0dder (January 09, 2010, 04:07 AM)
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For 3 months now my servers are running on Ubuntu 9.04 Server, I have to say that the distro is very smooth and stable in operation. So I do agree with you about "vanilla" distro's and from other personal experience I can say that compiling any distro for your hardware results in an extremely stable OS. It was RedHat on a 486, its task was to register traffic for some 50 domains (including several p*rn sites) and generate web statistics for those customers and our billing department. Running 4 years straight and was then turned off because it had to move to a different office building. Ah, compared with my (celeron 300MHz) Win98 desktop at the time it was a relief to work with that PC.

Thank you f0dder for making me remember  :Thmbsup:

Josh:
You mean Windows 9x where you had to reinstall every few months just because things got too slow? Now who wouldn't love that!

</sarcasm>

f0dder:
Faster filesystems is another virtue.-urlwolf (January 09, 2010, 12:02 PM)
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How much faster are those filesystems than NTFS for "normal" use, though? It's pretty hard to come up with a benchmark, considering that only ext2 is available for NT and that the NTFS support in linux can not be compared to native windows speed (neither the current ntfs3g nor the old wrapper around binary NT drivers). Yes, I know that some of the filesystems are theoretically better, but outside insane practices like putting 20k files in a single folder, can you feel the difference? (explorer.exe is dog slow with large folders, but that's because of explorer and icon extraction, not because of NTFS).

Also, most of the newer filesystems on linux (those actually offering performance benefits) can't yet be considered as mature as NTFS... there's plenty of ReiserFS horror stories around. EXT2 might or might not be faster, but it doesn't have journaling - EXT3 w/journaling should be stable, but I haven't tested it's speed... and really, for normal desktop/workstation use, I don't think I've ever bumped into a filesystem bottleneck.

One of the few reasons where I can see the filesystem make a big difference (apart from data security differences or managing features, like über-cool ZFS has) would be mail servers storing email in Maildir format (which is superior to mbox)... but for most other stuff I don't believe in having a zillion folders or files inside a folder :). That said, I wouldn't mind more filesystems being available for Windows; NTFS is decent, but I'd like the data-safety features of ZFS, and I wouldn't mind seeing proper head-to-head benchmarks, even if synthetics don't have much to do with desktop/workstation patterns.

You mean Windows 9x where you had to reinstall every few months just because things got too slow? Now who wouldn't love that!-Josh (January 09, 2010, 01:06 PM)
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Never really happened to me - when I needed a reinstall it was because I hosed my system, which was ever so easier on 9x than NT because of the lack of protection (user permissions as well as memory - having all DLLs in shared writable memory is bad). Back then it did mean a measurable performance difference to clean & compact your registry, though :)

Gothi[c]:
for most other stuff I don't believe in having a zillion folders or files inside a folder

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You should see the donationcoder smf attachments/uploads folder :D

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