Fast and powerful distro?

[dinkygreg]

sorry if this has been posted before, but I still want your current opinions. Well, I have been using Linux for a while (various distros), but not very happy. Now I want to choose a lightweight, fast, minimalist, customizable enough with no specific graphical environment, bleeding edge distro for a new laptop. I want to be able to compile from source to make my own changes. I am not a Linux expert and not even an advanced user. So what do you guys suggest?

Thanks.

[Kano]

lightweight is overrated. disable desktop search engines and even kde is lightning fast...

[gedgon]

Now I want to choose a lightweight, fast, minimalist, customizable enough with no specific graphical environment, bleeding edge distro for a new laptop. I want to be able to compile from source to make my own changes. I am not a Linux expert and not even an advanced user. So what do you guys suggest?

Thanks.

That's all about Arch But there's no such thing like "fast(er)". Arch can be lightweight or fat (like OpenSuse or Ubuntu). It all depends on what you do with it.

even kde is lightning fast...

Ahahhaa, uff, ok

[deanjo]

That's all about Arch But there's no such thing like "fast(er)". Arch can be lightweight or fat (like OpenSuse or Ubuntu). It all depends on what you do with it.

openSUSE is as bulky as you want it to be or as light as you want it to be. There are literally hundreds of projects/appliances built on openSUSE that are extremely lightweight on Susestudio.

[Nevertime]

There's really nothing in it speed wise between "light" and "fat" distos.

Kde, dispite being the most funtional gui is faster than gnome not that any of this makes much diffrence. Even with desktop searches switched on kde's performance is barly effected.

Arch might be typicaly a tiny bit faster than opensuse and ubuntu a little slower still in my expiriance but its hard to compare things that are so diffrent. I'm using chakra at the moment which is arch based and very nice though still an alpha.

The only reason i see for opting for a lightweight distro is if you have a really old computer otherwise don't asume you'll get better speed because other factors will make a more significant diffrence.

[gedgon]

There's really nothing in it speed wise between "light" and "fat" distos.

Yep, that's I said, but is between light and fat setup.

Kde, [...] is faster than gnome not that any of this makes much diffrence.

If you say so

[Nevertime]

If you say so

Not sure bugs that arn't in the more stable kde 4.5.5 dismises what I claimed.

[gedgon]

Not sure bugs that arn't in the more stable kde 4.5.5 dismises what I claimed.

It's the latest and greatest. Without new solid and Dolphin bugs it's still slow. Another example. Qt/Plasma X11 native backend performance

Do you want test with I/O operations?

Long story short, compare Gnome and KDE on old machine (e.g. '03 laptop). Gnome will be slow, KDE4 unusable.

[evolution]

Try Arch!

Like some people said before, try Arch Linux.

It's what you can consider a "do-it-yourself" distro, having also a lot of the most popular linux packages (already) precompiled (you just need to download the packages in order to use them ). Furthermore, its wiki is one the best places you can find to learn about how Linux works.

Also, as Phoronix forum member Arch user, try Archbang (link here) as a lightweight Arch-based alternative. It already includes an Arch Linux recent snapshot (Arch is rolling-release) from 4/2/2011 with some "lightweight" programs and Openbox.

Arch, compared to "bigger name" distros like OpenSuse and Ubuntu, is much less bloated (even if you compare it vs "netinstall" CDs) and it's kernel has better performance and is more "bleeding-edge" (Arch's stock kernel, is by default, the latest kernel.org stable release) than former distros (Ubuntu and OpenSuse).

My 2c, cheers!

p.s.: If you want a "bloat-less" exeprience, you can also do like in Gentoo and compile by yourself the packages you want... (like I do in some cases)

[popper]

sorry if this has been posted before, but I still want your current opinions. Well, I have been using Linux for a while (various distros), but not very happy. Now I want to choose a lightweight, fast, minimalist, customizable enough with no specific graphical environment, bleeding edge distro for a new laptop. I want to be able to compile from source to make my own changes. I am not a Linux expert and not even an advanced user. So what do you guys suggest?

Thanks.

OC it depends on how you want to define lightweight, fast, minimalist, customizable but with you also saying "I am not a Linux expert and not even an advanced user" that seems easy to answer, use a slax live CD http://www.slax.org/

select the modules you want to use from the list and be happy, or make the app module if you want if it doesnt already exist and place on your USB stick in the module dir, or load it in realtime off the LAN or web page you setup/find with the module you want.

plus OC slax is the only current live CD that has a working net boot option as standard, as in boot the live slax with the netboot server option and then net boot any other LAN conected PC on there to that same slax CD, and have fun

if you want a more fixed type install then use your customised slax liveCD as your
base and recreate that in Slackware etc.