How fast is Arch Linux?

Arch Linux with KDEmod. Very fast.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• arch
• linux
• kde
• kdemod
• fast

[alvarogd]

For those asking about specs, again:

It is a Core 2 Duo 6300, 1G RAM. Asus p5b-delux.

[aleclitvinov]

With Windows, a hypothetical "average user" who doesn't care to set up his system has the opportunity not to think about what's going on in his computer (in practice - until his credit card is hacked, his personal data exposed and his work lost or, if he's lucky, until his system is crippled by unnecessary services and bloated registry). He however has no opportunity to learn exactly what's going on in his computer, what's wrong with it and how that can be fixed. It's not his business.

[aleclitvinov]

@sebbeks i have some spare 2gb cards so it's a question of 5 minutes, but why? i have 10 tabs and a skype chat open right now, memory usage is 287mb (no, no swap). it's around 72mb after boot.

[sebbeks]

@aleclitvinov doesn't the 901 have 1gb of ram? it's almost nothing these days when trying to surf the web with more than 4 tabs, from experience. remember, less is not always better.

[aleclitvinov]

@sebbeks i have had a lot of laptops, the one i use now (asus eeepc 901) is pretty old but i like it, it's reliable, its hardware is 100% supported and it (still) has 6 hours battery life. there's a problem about finding a modern durable 9" netbook now. it has 12GB SSD storage and 4-5GB is usually free. but if it had 500GB i would still try to make the system that small. entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

[aleclitvinov]

@sebbeks it's not about KDE. i mean mandriva is managed with mcc. it does "everything most people need", and when it fails to help you you just don't know what to do because the way it works is not very transparent. mandriva has "everything most people will ever need" so besides installing the programs you will use you will have to clean things up because you don't need them.

for there is a point in updating software in unusual places because i travel a lot.

[sebbeks]

@aleclitvinov Yes but there is official documentation aswell, there is some on the Gentoo website. I don't see the point in updating software at all if you are on battery or at a wifi cafe. i've already told you that the way gentoo is designed is very different from arch. You can slap KDE on gentoo or on arch or on mandriva and it will look the same with the exception of some branding. 1.5 GB is nothing, if you really save need to that much disk space you should get a new laptop.

[aleclitvinov]

@sebbeks linux is usually quite... unofficial. as for editing PKGBUILDS everytime, i store them and usually only have to change the links and checksums. anyway i can edit them and upgrade arch in one coffee cup time in a wi-fi cafe. i don't wanna try to emerge world on battery. i don't have such battery. that's the main reason. i like to only have what i use, my whole system is 1.5GB large - only 3 times the portage tree. still both systems have more in common than any of them and say mandriva.

[sebbeks]

@aleclitvinov The wikis avaible for each OS is irrelavant to the discussion because none is official documentation. From experience blacklisting packages in arch breaks the system eventually because the libraries and dependencies change. Anybody who stares at GCC output is crazy. Sure if you like Arch then use it, but 90% of Arch users who say Gentoo is the same thing but source based don't know what they are talking about. The way the system is managed in Gentoo is very different from Arch.

[aleclitvinov]

@sebbeks by the way, there's a slang word in Russian, "krasnoglazik" (red-eyed guy). it's sometimes referred to any *nix user but usually means "gentoo, arch or freebsd user who spends sleepless nights optimizing his software instead of using it, whose eyes are red from staring into his terminal where something is being compiled".

[aleclitvinov]

@sebbeks debian and slackware don't have the wiki encyclopedias arch and gentoo have. masking packages in arch is as easy as blacklisting them in pacman.conf. you're right about the complicated package customization. i call it "binary penalty". with i686 packages however it's not as critical as it can seem. i do use gentoo on my desktop machine, and i know the pros of it. but my lifestyle (backpack and netbook) makes me like arch better.

[sebbeks]

@aleclitvinov Those similarities can be applied to any distro which does not come with X installed, such as Debian, Slackware, etc. There are no real similarities because Arch does not follow the Gentoo design principles therefore Arch is unflexible and uncustomizable. To customize you have to hack A LOT of PKGBUILDS and do that EVERY time Arch forces you to upgrade a package. In Gentoo you use USE flags and you can mask packages you don't want to upgrade without breaking the system.