How much faster is Gentoo than Slack? And what programs benifit from this?

oh hmm i think its faster than slack you can feel it programs hmm all as i have to say but if you dont have the time to compile everything from the base which took me 2-3 days then youd better stay with slack :=) i have slack installed as well

Actually someone posted some benchmarks one time that had slack being faster than gentoo. The gentoo folks all objected that it must have been an error in flag settings when all that stuff was compiled.

I had wondered if any benchmark tests had been performed as I've used Gentoo in the past, but returned to Slack because I hated the time it takes to compile from source. I frankly could not tell any major difference in load times between the two distros. If anything, I felt (and still do) that Slack loads just a bit faster.

They're both good distros, but Slack suits my needs better than Gentoo.

KOOL! one is trying to leave it and I'm getting back from my eresies (with red hat, then suse and now mandrake ...)

Inital OS load times are very much related to the init system used as well as what services you have running. With the same services running Slack will probably load up faster than Gentoo simply because it uses a BSD style init system, while Gentoo uses a SysV style init system. This is nice (and the BSD style init system is one of the reasons I prefer to use Slack to the other distros I've tried), but it doesn't mean that much for general system performance after boot up. I couldn't say which one has better general performance, but both Slackware and Gentoo tend to be well ahead of the pack in that department as far as I've seen.

The one advantage that Gentoo has over Slack is that central repository of ports (with dependency checking). This advantage starts, of course, after installing the system (of which Slack was WAY easier and faster to do).

Since I've been doing most of my building from source, I thought maybe to try the emerde package. Anybody got feedback from it?

Just thought I'd post an update. I realize it's been 9 years !

To all the naysayers: I did end up staying with Gentoo for a good 18 months, but quickly came to realize the system becomes a horrible, unmanageable mess pretty quickly.

I then moved on to Debian where I stayed until now (a brief flirtation with Ubuntu not withstanding).

In this time i've graduated with degrees in computer science and I'm currently a senior sys admin/sometime project manager in a server environment with over 1000 linux installs. Since we have VPS sitting on some hardware its more likely to be up around the 5000 Os instance level.....but its all CentOS.

*sigh* I'm not a fan of rpm.

I do occasionally come back to Slackware though...just to check things out. Kinda like catching up with a lost childhood friend :-)

So, from humble beginnings come good things. Linux started out as my hobby and is now my career and I love it. When your job is your hobby, your job doesn't feel like work!

5 members found this post helpful.

wow this is cool. a 9 year update. i read this whole thread, just because it seems so cool to me that this discussion is culminating after 9 years. also, glad to hear you made it to a good job that you enjoy, gives hope to the rest of us

1 members found this post helpful.

Funny, just a little prior to your initial posting about switching to gentoo in '02, I had tried it as well. I don't think it even lasted me a day. I built up to the point I got it working, but decided that it had too much garbage in it. I looked at debian, and decided its installer was terrible. I guess using LFS got me spoiled by then. I had used SuSE for about a year, and Slackware 8.1 just got released, so I tried it. So it hard to believe it's been well over 9 years since that happened, and it's only been slackware at home.

Since all that time passed, I also moved into the work force, where we use RHEL4 for engineering work. I don't like RPM much either, so I installed pkgtools, with a few modifications to make it work non-root, and rolled packages from the latest slackware.

I give him two days on Gentoo and he'll back back to Slackware.

Really? I would have said 18 months.

2 members found this post helpful.

"Portage" isn't as user as "apt-get" is. In fact learning "portage" is really a pain. If you don't have a program and you run the command 'apt-get" at least will tell you how to download it, or with Slackware you can search Slackbuilds and find the package if one exists and it's dependencies. With portage you have to know the package name which can be a pain at times especially with dependencies, or at least it was this way last time I used it two years ago.

Nice update Sickboy. Glad things worked out for you. Sounds like you need to get those servers converted over to Slack here soon

Gentoo does not use a SysV style init system.