Arch Linux 2009.08 Benchmarks

[yoshi314]

And obviously you can't take a joke. You don't need 2 weeks to install Gentoo. It's a *joke*. It's a joke because Gentoo needs over a day to install on recent PCs. It's a long time. That's why it's funny to make jokes about it. Like "Chuck Norris needs only 2 weeks" and such. It's a JOKE.

jokes are ok for people who "get" them.

but if you tell such a thing to a person who would like to experiment with gentoo - how do you think he'll take it?

A quick question to Gentoo users: do you consider your Gentoo installation a hobby? I could certainly understand that: while I don't use Gentoo myself, I do use Arch and like to install & test various distros on bootable USB sticks as a hobby (time-wasting but fun!)

gentoo is great if you want to use lots of packages built straight off svn/git/hg/etc and have package manager keep them under control.

arch linux comes close here, but gentoo's solution is more flexible. e.g. as you can enable/disable certain features in those packages without having to rewrite your packaging script. or you can reinstall those packages on a regular basis, in an automated way.

[Apopas]

A quick question to Gentoo users: do you consider your Gentoo installation a hobby? I could certainly understand that: while I don't use Gentoo myself, I do use Arch and like to install & test various distros on bootable USB sticks as a hobby (time-wasting but fun!)

I always read that gentoo needs a lot of time, it's pointless, waste of time etc. Ofcourse, these comments come always from people that didn't try gentoo seriously. So, here is my experience with gentoo:
I have a desktop pc more than 5 years old. It's 64 bit, from the first 64 bit proccessors that came to light. It's nice, I don't need something better. This pc is used by me and 3 other users of the family. So, it must always be workable and not a matter of experiments.
I installed gentoo in this system almost immediately after I bought it and guess what, I still have the same istallation with the difference it's more modern than the latest Ubuntu and Fedora. I remember back during installation I had a hard time to setup gentoo. I needed 1 whole day to make my system workable and over 3 days to bring it to the point I really liked. But that was all. I worked for three days five years ago and since then I have the most modern OS, the less bloated and the fastest one.
Now, how I keep it up to date? Each weekend I run an update. Usually, there are a dozen of packages that have updates. The proccess even if needs compilation is automated and in less than 30 minutes, while I surfing, are ready. Ofcourse there are some packages that need a lot of time to be compiled, especially in older pcs like mine. For these, there are always and binaries if you want to use, like Firefox and Openoffice. But still even Firefox needs 40 minutes to be compiled in my system. It's not so hard and it worths the time because the final binary is faster and you can choose if you like your build to support dbus or gnome or iceweasel etc. The same for Openoffice. I build it myself because I don't want it to support java. I admit it needs over 6 hours but the proccess it's again automated and I let it go during the night while I'm sleeping. I remind you though that there are always and binaries if you want to have it in a few minutes. Ok, you can still say that you spend some time each weekend for these things. Well, is not really more than the time someone needs to update his Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04 and then the occasianl updates he does.
Also, the people usually have the missconception that the benefit of gentoo is to be fast because you can optimize it during compilation. While this can be true, is not the great advantage of the distro. The real benefit is the so called flags, with which you can choose what options the packages you build you want to support. For example, you choose if you want, beagle or tracker or xmp or doc or even gnome support in your nautilus. And you don't have to do this all the time, you can choose these options in a config file were they are stored permanently. This reduce the bloat to minimum and finally you have the applications you really need in your system.
So the conclusion is:
gentoo is for the mature Linux user ofcourse and while you can not jump to your friend's home and install it in a matter of minutes it has other really important benefits. It's installation is a real trouble but you do it once and for all and after that you really relax and you have one of the best things the Linux OS has to offer. Fast, simple, always modern and greatly customizable.

[yoshi314]

yeah, i think the biggest myth about gentoo is that your computer is "locked" or unusable when package manager builds the software. which is untrue.

the most silently omitted advantage of source based distribution is that by building eveything on user's machine, it works around a lot of problems with binary redistribution of certain packages (e.g. dvdcss support, mozilla branded software, IDEA algorithm, various patented multimedia codecs).

while most distributions provide those features in external repositories, gentoo can have them in the main package tree and leave their activation to the user.

[BlackStar]

yeah, i think the biggest myth about gentoo is that your computer is "locked" or unusable when package manager builds the software. which is untrue.

the most silently omitted advantage of source based distribution is that by building eveything on user's machine, it works around a lot of problems with binary redistribution of certain packages (e.g. dvdcss support, mozilla branded software, IDEA algorithm, various patented multimedia codecs).

while most distributions provide those features in external repositories, gentoo can have them in the main package tree and leave their activation to the user.

I fail to see the distinction. It doesn't make any difference whether they are in a repo called "extras" or "main" - the user has to activate the software manually in both cases.

[nanonyme]

I have a desktop pc more than 5 years old. It's 64 bit, from the first 64 bit proccessors that came to light. It's nice, I don't need something better.

That's actually imo the best part of Gentoo. It's very far customizable and you don't end up collecting garbage over time if you pay attention to what you're doing. (compare hard dependencies vs USE-flag-controlled dependencies) Even though I don't currently bother keeping one such a system, it's imo the most pro-choice distro I've tried.
If you want to disable enabled-by-default stuff in binary distros, you end up compiling loads of the userland there too so programs won't end up being linked against stuff you don't want them to. (so you can safely remove the "dependencies") And binary distro environments usually aren't really designed for that to be trivial. Gentoo is.

[BlackStar]

That's actually imo the best part of Gentoo. It's very far customizable and you don't end up collecting garbage over time if you pay attention to what you're doing. (compare hard dependencies vs USE-flag-controlled dependencies) Even though I don't currently bother keeping one such a system, it's imo the most pro-choice distro I've tried.
If you want to disable enabled-by-default stuff in binary distros, you end up compiling loads of the userland there too so programs won't end up being linked against stuff you don't want them to. (so you can safely remove the "dependencies") And binary distro environments usually aren't really designed for that to be trivial. Gentoo is.

This is a matter of distro design, not a difference between binary and source distros. Arch is binary distro that behaves exactly like Gentoo in this regard. Nothing is enabled by default unless *you* enable it, and it's trivial to disable stuff you don't want anymore.

[RealNC]

To the question of whether I consider Gentoo as a hobby, I'd say yes. Though it only became a hobby after I used it for a while. I was on SuSE Linux and later openSUSE before I came to Gentoo. Those didn't offer any incentives to become my hobby Gentoo offered so many tweaking possibilities that at some point I was simply interested in them. Then I ended up fixing bugs and write new ebuilds and submit them to Gentoo and/or upstream. So I guess this makes it a hobby because it's kinda fun.

Edit:
I never submitted any patches to SuSE/openSUSE. Ever. And I did find bug there too, but the work needed to even attempt to fix them was boring, so I never really felt like doing it.

[Apopas]

This is a matter of distro design, not a difference between binary and source distros. Arch is binary distro that behaves exactly like Gentoo in this regard. Nothing is enabled by default unless *you* enable it, and it's trivial to disable stuff you don't want anymore.

Mplayer in gentoo has these options you can enable or disable:
3dnow X a52 aac aalib alsa ass cddb cdio dirac directfb dts dv dvd dvdnav enca encode esd faac faad fbcon ggi gif iconv jpeg libcaca live mad mmx
mng mp2 mp3 network openal opengl osdmenu oss png quicktime rar real rtc schroedinger sdl shm speex sse sse2 theora tremor truetype unicode vdpau
vorbis x264 xscreensaver xv xvid 3dnowext (-altivec) bidi bindist bl cdparanoia cpudetection custom-cflags custom-cpuopts debug dga doc dvb dxr3 ftp gmplayer ipv6 jack joystick ladspa lirc lzo md5sum mmxext nas nut opencore amr% pnm pulseaudio pvr radio samba ssse3 (-svga) teletext tga v4l v4l2 (-vidix) (-win32codecs) xanim
xinerama xvmc zoran (-nemesi%*)" VIDEO_CARDS="mga nvidia vesa s3virge tdfx"
so if I only have xvid videos in my disk I can tell to gentoo to build MPlayer with only xvid, alsa and nvidia support. Thus no other depedencies will be ever built. How do I enable/disable these features in Arch?

[BlackStar]

Mplayer in gentoo has these options you can enable or disable:
3dnow X a52 aac aalib alsa ass cddb cdio dirac directfb dts dv dvd dvdnav enca encode esd faac faad fbcon ggi gif iconv jpeg libcaca live mad mmx
mng mp2 mp3 network openal opengl osdmenu oss png quicktime rar real rtc schroedinger sdl shm speex sse sse2 theora tremor truetype unicode vdpau
vorbis x264 xscreensaver xv xvid 3dnowext (-altivec) bidi bindist bl cdparanoia cpudetection custom-cflags custom-cpuopts debug dga doc dvb dxr3 ftp gmplayer ipv6 jack joystick ladspa lirc lzo md5sum mmxext nas nut opencore amr% pnm pulseaudio pvr radio samba ssse3 (-svga) teletext tga v4l v4l2 (-vidix) (-win32codecs) xanim
xinerama xvmc zoran (-nemesi%*)" VIDEO_CARDS="mga nvidia vesa s3virge tdfx"
so if I only have xvid videos in my disk I can tell to gentoo to build MPlayer with only xvid, alsa and nvidia support. Thus no other depedencies will be ever built. How do I enable/disable these features in Arch?

You'd use the Arch Build System to trivially modify build options. Of course, chances are someone has already created the build script you want.

[nanonyme]

I wish they'd start compiling programs with directfb support in binary distros too nowadays that KMS is coming...
Edit: Oh, crap. It can apparently use fbdev anyway.