Sabayon 7 vs. Ubuntu 11.10 Performance

[openfreak]

I respectfully disagree. A "desktop" user is not limited to web surfing, mp3 playing etc. I am a desktop user and write speeds and cpu benchmarks are important to my tasks such as encoding, media editing, dbase management and development, etc.

I was referring to average desktop users, who are limited to web surfing, mp3 playing etc. like my family members and friends who are not tech-savy. Usability is one of the most important thing that these users look for. Apple would be a fitting example. It is liked by users, because it is much more usable (compared to windows and most linux distros) , and stable.

Even though Android has gained traction in the smartphone and tablet market, I see linux has't seen similar luck on the Personal Computers front. It seems that most of the distros are driven by nerds for nerds. Common people find it hard to relate to linux. They are not interested in 10% extra write performance, but are interested in how the OS can make their life easy.

It's just that I wish to see linux as a preferred OS for majority of the CROWD.

[openfreak]

I respectfully disagree. A "desktop" user is not limited to web surfing, mp3 playing etc. I am a desktop user and write speeds and cpu benchmarks are important to my tasks such as encoding, media editing, dbase management and development, etc.

I was referring to average desktop users, who are limited to web surfing, mp3 playing etc. like my family members and friends who are not tech-savy. Usability is one of the most important thing that these users look for. Apple would be a fitting example. It is liked by users, because it is much more usable (compared to windows and most linux distros) , and stable.

Even though Android has gained traction in the smartphone and tablet market, I see linux has't seen similar luck on the Personal Computers front. It seems that most of the distros are driven by nerds for nerds. Common people find it hard to relate to linux. They are not interested in 10% extra write performance, but are interested in how the OS can make their life easy.

It's just that I wish to see linux as a preferred OS for majority of the CROWD.

[ulenrich]

expected

expected results:

- Sabayon Fusion IO Patches having better write performance (but less read?)
- Sabayon Fusion BFS patch resulting in less throughput for some server and calculations load. This corresponds with people talking about snappier feeling of that system: Cpu attention is drawn to the user.

A question from above had no answer yet from testers: Was ubuntu recompiled using gcc-4.5?
As of many occasions here, also this test was testing a lot. Too much to draw conclusions?

[deanjo]

I was referring to average desktop users, who are limited to web surfing, mp3 playing etc.

For those people they have Android and such. Funny that you should mention Apple and their OS however since Apple routinely concentrates on improving performance as well as usability and Apple also caters to multimedia content creation where it does benefit from those optimizations. OS X 10.6 for example was almost purely a performance upgrade over 10.5.

[jcgeny]

are they able to install in a vhd file ?
good question , as windows7-8 are able to manage booting vhd files , that could help linux to become more used .
it s better than grub and iso because it makes the system having the writeable option

[BlackStar]

I love it how Ubuntu performs on par or faster than these supposedly "fast" distributions. First Arch, now Sabayon.

Sabayon "feels" snappier, really, is that the best you can do?

[crazycheese]

What are you talking about? Sabayon can use Gentoo's Portage system if the user chooses to.

RIGHT. Sabayon can become Gentoo, but only if user chooses to. Then, it will eventually end as a mess..

Also, sabayon is gentoo pushed into specific pattern and delivered as monolithic block. There is nothing Gentoo in Sabayon. Calculate Linux is more Gentoo, yet, imagine this: when they added binary profiles - they locked the default applications list. This means, if you do not want ANYTHING installed from binary profile, you have to switch from building everything from source. Emerge limitation. Additionally, unless you recompile every package (purge tree) when going to source profile(ie normal gentoo), the system will start introducing segfaults, more with every update. Happens, because your setting and your choice of flags irreversably affect other packages which are compiled with different settings in surviving binary part, resulting in wrong pointers and linking breakages.

Short: if you want source, do source. If you do binary, you have to be extremely accurate if you deviate from factory binary build rules. Best forget source approach at all. This means Sabayon was Gentoo, when it was compiled at "factory", home of sabayon developers. After this, sabayon is NOT gentoo.

Additionally, because Sabayon looses all benefits of source-based distro(and will start breaking if "user chooses to") - it ultimately ends as half-arsed binary distro. This is because Sabayon looses in a) amount of users and b) package management(compare possibilities of apt to entropy to understand) from the eyes of normal people.

So, if you want better Gentoo, you have to improve Gentoo. Funtoo is very good try to solve part of Gentoo problems. Exherbo may solve ALL Gentoo problems someday. Archlinux (if compared to) made Gentoo "simple" by cutting everything "complex" and producing basic system in binary form, yet still requiring knowledge and cutting essence of Gentoo in the process. Calculate Linux solves bit of Gentoo problems. But Sabayon went way into different direction. Someone uses it. Good! But it is not Gentoo.

Consider this:
I have two three-terrabyte disks, and I want to partition them in GPT placing system and /home on first drive with ext4 and using second drive as big file storage (in GPT too) with XFS and attaching it as link to several accounts (in /home).
The system should have minimal LXDE environiment with scientific applications. Im sure I will never print, use webcameras etc. I also want to run several webservers on machine, so I need kernel without modules with only hardware I have. All - optimized for current CPU.

Can you do this with Sabayon? Which is faster approach - using stage3 or using Sabayon image and start cut-and-slice process?
Of course, if you replace Gentoo cfg files and manual setup with very flexible graphical tools, it will be possible. It will improve Gentoo too. But never, if you cut any of its functionality or go in compromises.

[BlueJayofEvil]

*snip*

Sabayon never claimed to be Gentoo or even a replacement for it. It's a primarily desktop-oriented distro with a focus on an out-of-the-box experience (YMMV). They developed their binary package manager to aid in this approach. Sabayon is much more independent now because of this.
They were derived from Gentoo originally, but sort of like Chakra is doing, they are making their own path while keeping a nod to their origin.

Gentoo is Gentoo; Sabayon is Sabayon. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Each has their own appeal to different users.

[Licaon]

I'll have to reinstall an older system as the main drive broke:
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 1467MHz skt. A
Cooler: Titan D5TB/CU5B Al, copper core
M/B: ASUS A7N266-VM SE v1.05 ( nForce 220D/420 ) mATX
MEM: 2x512Mb DDR1 400MHz NoName
VID: ATI Radeon 9200SE 128Mb DDR1-64bit AGP4x DVI/VGA/S-Video
SND: nForce SoundStorm DolbyDigital 5.1 integrated ( Realtek ALC650 & S/PDIF Coax+Optical Out )
NET: nForce Ethernet 10/100Mbps integrat ( RealTek 8201L PHY )
HDD: Maxtor 40Gb ( b0rken possibly by a power failure ) + 20Gb ATA100
DVD: LG HL ST 4163B
FDD: 1.44" Noname
PSU: Noname 350W
Case: Noname white
Display: Philips 170S 17" LCD

I'm using Virtualbox on my current machine, so yeah maybe things get skewed a bit but the system is in another city and I only have the disk drives at hand. Virtualbox settings limited to 1024Mb RAM, 128Mb vRAM, 1 core of 3200Mhz with executive cap of 46% ( so that it gets closer to 1467MHz although I think it's actually better than the real hardware )

Long intro, I've been testing some lighter 32bit distros *buntu flavoured and Sabayons own flavours and I've been pretty surprised to see that even Ubuntu Unity works smoother than Sabayon XFCE.
The system used to run Debian Sid KDE 4.4 ( IIRC ) but it felt pretty sluggish at times.
My top so far:
*Lubuntu
*ElementaryOS 0.1 ( looking good but not on par regarding translations )
*Xubuntu
*Mint 11
*Ubuntu plain ( but the interface is still a mess )
*Sabayon XFCE
*Sabayon GNOME
*Sabayon KDE

Also, trying to get a hang of the whole emerge thing, first of all the specific Entropy thing just updates weekly core and security and then just sits there using 100% CPU to no end ( I know i'm running a live system but damn ). And using emerge directly ( although I don't know if it still should work !? ) like "emerge sys-process/htop" yields that there is no such package, i guess my Gentoo n00biness is at hand here as I did not go in the whole overlays info.

[rogerdv]

I was referring to average desktop users, who are limited to web surfing, mp3 playing etc. like my family members and friends who are not tech-savy. Usability is one of the most important thing that these users look for. Apple would be a fitting example. It is liked by users, because it is much more usable (compared to windows and most linux distros) , and stable.

This benchmark is not for those people. It is for people like me, who cares about what distro reads faster. Faster reads means that my apps start faster (I think).