Fast and powerful distro?

[gedgon]

Epic fail was to choose gtk for Firefox thus its interface is slow as crap.

Fail again. It's XUL fault, not GTK+.

[kraftman]

Y

Fail again. It's XUL fault, not GTK+.

Nope. Thunar's interface is also slow. It doesn't use xul. Double fail. Btw. Gtk-gnutella is probably an only gtk based app with responsive interface.

[DeepDayze]

Try CrunchBang!

Crunchbang's now based on Debian Testing and it uses Openbox as a window manager. It's as minimal and clean as it comes

[gedgon]

Y

Nope. Thunar's interface is also slow. It doesn't use xul. Double fail. Btw. Gtk-gnutella is probably an only gtk based app with responsive interface.

Rotfl, and my car is fast because is red. The ultimate truth.

[yotambien]

You can't go wrong with...anything, really, as long as it's not Arch. Phoronix benchmarks debunked the Arch myth last year:

A Five-Way Linux Distribution Comparison
Is Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu?

A representative example from the first one:



LOL

To the OP, this pretended to be a joke. Arch will of course be as fast as anything else (though there's not reason for it to be substantially faster either).

There was a time when posting something like this would break havoc in the forum. Not anymore : (

[kraftman]

Rotfl, and my car is fast because is red. The ultimate truth.

Look at Blackstar reply - colour (theme) can have impact on performance. My car is fast, because it has powerfull engine - Qt.

[Jimbo]

I really like KDE4, lot of devs have recognised that qt libs have more code quality. The weak point of kde 4 is memory usage, kde4 is a memory sucker, so it isn't exactly a lightweight desktop environment as OP has asked. About speed/cpu usage, well all DE are using little cpu so you shouldn't note any speed impact on your apps because u are using one DE in particular, except for composite - opengl apps, but this is another history.

About memory usage, you can tune kde4 by totally disabling akonadi-nepomuk manually (the configure setting on system window doesn't do the job).

450 MB with akonadi enabled
230 MB with akonadi disabled

to do so:

*** totally disable the fucking akonadi ***

Open ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc
Code:
StartServer=false

Open ~/.kde4/share/config/nepomukserverrc and set "Start Nepomuk" to false.
Code:
[Basic Settings]
Start Nepomuk=false

Open ~/.kde4/share/config/kdedrc and set "autoload" to false for nepomuksearchmodule:
Code:
[Module-nepomuksearchmodule]
autoload=false

I have filled a bug about the abnormal amount of akonadi memory usage, so if you are interested vote it

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=262981

[mirv]

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.

If you have the time, I really recommend you simply play around and see what you like. To really get the most out of any distro, learn-by-playing is probably going to be best option, and you improve your linux skills at the same time.
Given your requirements, I do recommend looking at gentoo, although be prepared for some difficulties in setting up & learning with it.
For desktop shells, again just try and see what you like. If you'll be travelling around and using a trackpad more than a mouse, best to keep that in mind as well - a desktop that runs fast, and one that you can use fast aren't necessarily going to be the same (as an example, not sure I'd like to use E16 with a trackpad).