Re: Why Linux, Why Debian

[Jack Carroll <dischord@myrealbox.com>]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 06:34:25AM +1100, bob parker wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 10:09, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> >
> >  9) Does the gentoo configurability deliver significantly better
> >     performance? Is the added step of compilation too much of an
> >     inconvenience?
> 
> By compiling all applications with optimisations for your processor, you can 
> have your machine do nothing between keystrokes and/or mouse clicks a whole 
> lot faster than it otherwise would.  Naturally you want time critical code 
> such as the kernel optimised but there is no need to use gentoo for that.


	I'm just getting started with Gentoo, and haven't made it all the
way through installation yet.  So this is tentative.
	But, there are a lot of CPU hogs in GNU/Linux besides the kernel. 
Some browsers take the other side of forever to start up, especially on an
older machine whose RAM space is merely huge, rather than inconceivable. 
OpenOffice.org is notoriously slow.  So you probably don't want to build
everything for your machine, but there are quite a few candidates for local
compilation.
	Of course, you can install from pre-built packages first, which is
what I'm trying to do, and then selectively compile the ones that look worth
optimizing.