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Intel Ultrabook: Fedora 18 vs. Ubuntu 13.04 Tests

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  • #11
    Originally posted by liam View Post
    I hesitate to say this, but for most users it is safer to stick to defaults than to try to tweak things.
    For one thing, you need to know what tweaks are available, then you need to know what it is they do. Next you need to be able to reliably test these changes to see if they actually make a difference in what you care about (this later one is the biggie, IMHO).
    I know you are aware of these things, but I wanted to explain why I think it is safer to stick with the defaults for most users, and why benchmarking can be useful, even if that which is done on phoronix isn't of the most useful kind.
    Your point about debugging is fair, though.
    Well, sure, I was assuming a certain level of knowledge. The corresponding advice for most 'end users' is "pick a distro based on whatever the latest groupthink is and then DON'T FREAKING FIDDLE WITH STUFF because smarter people than you have already set it all up properly. Really. Don't do what that kid on a forum thread is telling you to do. Stop. Put the text editor down."

    But it usually takes people a few painful experiments to come to that conclusion. =)

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    • #12
      Originally posted by AdamW View Post
      Well, sure, I was assuming a certain level of knowledge. The corresponding advice for most 'end users' is "pick a distro based on whatever the latest groupthink is and then DON'T FREAKING FIDDLE WITH STUFF because smarter people than you have already set it all up properly. Really. Don't do what that kid on a forum thread is telling you to do. Stop. Put the text editor down."

      But it usually takes people a few painful experiments to come to that conclusion. =)
      You know, you're being glib, I think, but your comment is either a sad fact, or a data point suggesting more needs to be done to see what it is the "user" actually wants/needs.
      I know, good luck with that

      Something I don't understand about desktops distros, especially ones like ubuntu, but also, in theory, fedora, is why they aren't defaulting to a preemptive kernel like windows and osx. I understand that some decisions have been made in fedora that supporting more than one kernel is too many kernels to support, but it's not as though RH doesn't make extensive use of the rt patches so it would seem it would be useful to have more people testing them. That change, by itself, would stop a good amount of tinkering, I think.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by liam View Post
        I hesitate to say this, but for most users it is safer to stick to defaults than to try to tweak things.
        For one thing, you need to know what tweaks are available, then you need to know what it is they do. Next you need to be able to reliably test these changes to see if they actually make a difference in what you care about (this later one is the biggie, IMHO).
        I know you are aware of these things, but I wanted to explain why I think it is safer to stick with the defaults for most users, and why benchmarking can be useful, even if that which is done on phoronix isn't of the most useful kind.
        Your point about debugging is fair, though.
        Sure, but if you're running a web server and you're sensitive about the performance, *you* need to know these things. Good defaults are nice, but the people providing the default configuration don't know what hardware you're running, so there are limits to what they can do. If you care about server performance, it's your job to know what the settings mean, and run your own benchmarks until you're happy it's working optimally.

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        • #14
          i don't like theses distros, suits well for desktop but not for servers, they are not enough stable

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          • #15
            Originally posted by Delgarde View Post
            Sure, but if you're running a web server and you're sensitive about the performance, *you* need to know these things. Good defaults are nice, but the people providing the default configuration don't know what hardware you're running, so there are limits to what they can do. If you care about server performance, it's your job to know what the settings mean, and run your own benchmarks until you're happy it's working optimally.
            I'm not arguing against any of that. My only point was that defaults need to be well chosen for whatever arena the OS is intended.
            Testing server functionality on fedora is a bit silly as few would run fedora as a server (or at least a production server).
            What would be nice would be a few meta packages that "optimize" a distro for various uses. So, a desktop should install a preempt kernel with various knobs twisted as the packager deems appropriate (hopefully having tested said tweaks and found settings that "work well for most" on the intended arena), a server would keep the default cooperative kernel, and, perhaps, a few options the user could specify after install to indicate how the server is intended to be used (application, web server, file server, whatever), and a low latency desktop for content creators (both visual and audio content creators). These things are possible b/c there are distros that do exactly these things, but it seems a waste of resources to have completely separate distros that make only a few changes (changes which could be handled through meta-packaging). All of these should provide good starting places for the tweaker (hopefully with some docs as too what settings they have changed from the default of the server).
            I hope this makes my point clearer.

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