Is Antergos Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu, Fedora?

[dungeon]

I recently tested at Half Life lost coast with my recent NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti Manjaro and gave me 150 fps and Ubuntu gave me 100 fps.

Lets guess, you are using Unity on Manjaro... I know what is it nvidia developer uses Manjaro, because he likes green & black .

But OK maybe default is faster, because of some features, software versions, etc... basicaly there is not much diff other than that, and u can tweak both distros - that means - major difference of all OS & distros is user who use it .

[sarmad]

I haven't tried Arch myself, but you should also test things like memory usage, startup time, application load times, etc. These factors are more important than computation performance when it comes to how fast and light weight a system feels.

[edoantonioco]

You should make a benchmark including Kaosx, reason? read the FAQ Its just to see how it behaves for games.
And I would like to see if SteamOS is any better now, because there have been some time since the last time it was tested.

[akincer]

documentation is also top-notch

It's been at least a year since I last gave Arch a whirl, but I did NOT find this to be the case. At all. I'm not a Linux noob and have run and managed various distros for quite a few years. But my experience in building a highly functional desktop from scratch is non-existent, so that's what I set out to do with Arch and turned to the documentation to assist me in this.

To call that experience frustrating would be too kind. I'm not quite sure what I'd call it, but the one thing I can say is that the documentation for building what I'd call a highly functional desktop was nearly worthless. And I tried browsing the Wiki directly and Googling thirty ways from Sunday. I was not impressed with the results.

Maybe in the last year or two the documentation on this has made leaps and bounds, but if not then I'd call it a dismal failure for what seems like a very ordinary task someone might want to accomplish.

FWIW -- I tried finding documentation on building a highly function desktop using both GNOME and XFCE. IIRC, the XFCE documentation was light years better than the GNOME, but both were absurdly incomplete.

[smitty3268]

I haven't tried Arch myself, but you should also test things like memory usage, startup time, application load times, etc. These factors are more important than computation performance when it comes to how fast and light weight a system feels.

Yeah, i strongly suspect all the people saying Arch is faster are talking about responsiveness issues, not throughput benchmarks like michael tests. That's been something he's been told for years, but he hasn't ever added any better tests.

[xeekei]

At the end of the day, the performance of Antergos Linux was within the same ballpark as Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Fedora 20. The only cases where Antergos was faster was where the rolling-release distribution had quickly pulled in a newer version of Mesa / Linux kernel that benefited some particular graphics tests, etc, but there was no magical performance out of Antergos as many Arch Linux fans would like the Linux community to believe.

I'm sorry, but the very reason we "believe" it is faster, is precisely because it is more up to date. There could of course be performance regressions, but most of the time performance increases with updates.

Nobody claimed any "magical performance" just because it is Arch.

[pmorph]

As for desktop usage, my experience is that the *perceived* performance is close to identical almost in all cases, excluding the systems whose creators made plain&simple *mistakes*
In other words: If your performance sucks, the system is more likely to be broken than "badly tuned".

[Vim_User]

It should be clear to anyone even slightly experienced with Linux (and OSes in general) that the fastest distributions always will be the source based ones, but only if the person administering the system is proficient in tuning the OS to the hardware and the specific use case/workload.

On a different topic: Seriously, Michael, if you test a distro put its name in your spellchecker. We know already that that quantity is more important for you that quality, but not being able to spell Antergos correctly on the complete first page is a new low for you.

[Chuckn2x]

Arch Linux just feels faster than other distros, but that is probably because there is less running in the background with Arch than other distros. I use Ubuntu and Debian mostly right now because they are a bit more noob friendly(me) and I don't always understand how to set things up properly without a lot of troubleshooting. I always end up missing steps or configuring things wrong, and that is mostly due to my lack of attention to detail. I love tinkering with stuff, but sometimes I just need my computer to work without much hassle and that is why I use Ubuntu and Debian mostly.

[mir3x]

Last time i checked phoronix test suite - it tested THE SAME binaries between systems, so xonotic from arch and xonotic from ubuntu are the same ... those tests are far far from decent ...