That's one of the reasons why I asked. I do understand people see it as a problem but basing measurements on psychological significance is (with all due respect) not objective wrt overall system performance. If you took for instance two machines similar in SW and HW, but one with a InitNG, Cinit, Pinit, Runit, Texas Flood or other non-default parallelising init replacement you would perceive that system to be faster. So that ends up kind of like measured vs wind chill temperature or the need for people to see a running dog, rotating hourglass or whatnot to believe the system is busy. The majority of GNU/Linux machines still are servers which are not rebooted often. I do understand if people do not care for that argument because it doesn't support a quest for better measurements, it only shows an objective "one fits all" benchmark might be less easy to select IMHO.


Yes, I think that kind of benchmarks are a "better" way to measure performance. The downside is that like most tests it's focus is on only one aspect.
//moderator.note: to keep this thread clean I removed the hijack and your reply.


IMHO the kind of comparison we're looking for can not be done objectively without taking into account all differences ranging from HW, kernel, (kernel) caching and choice of filesystem to the services a machine provides, sysctl tweaks (like choice of scheduler), Desktop Environment choice and whatnot. Given two machines with the same HW, stock SW, kernel and configuration but from different distributions, and given the fact the kernel keeps itself busy with things only the kernel is interested in, maybe it's not a benchmark for overall system performance that could show the difference "better" but a one that measures various userland bottlenecks?

The reason I asked the question at all is because I don't consider myself a "distro hopper" but more of a "distro collector". Before anyone scoffs at that comment when I have so many distros listed in my signature, I would say again that computers and Linux are my passion and hobby. I am fortunate enough to have the resources and room to have 7 computers in my home to feed my hobby. Since I don't anything mission critical, I find it very enjoyable to test and study different distros. That includes learning their package management, stability and speed.

However, I always try to keep one of my laptops as my "workhorse" where I do whatever serious work I do (such as that work is), which includes a number of projects I do for work and maintain home files and such. The new laptop I purchased is the one I intended to fill that role. I immediately removed the hard drive that contained Vista that came with it, and inserted a new drive. Now I want to have a good stable distro to add to it that I can keep for the forseeable future and that I can count on. Debian seemed to be the right choice because on my desktop, it just zooms. But I have not tried it on this newer laptop and have been looking at Slackware or Debian. My concern with Debian is that to get the stability, I seem to have to give-in to having to have older software. I think I would have a nightmare of a time getting Slackware to work with all the hardware. Whichever I choose, I want to have the latest kernel (2.6.25) and to do that I am assuming I will have to go for Debian Sid, which may put me in the same boat I am in with Hardy. I really like them both and will choose one or the other this week and put it one the new laptop with Hardy.

Bob

About a year ago I upgraded from Debian Sarge to Etch on one of my desktop machines. I believe it is an AMD 1700+ or so.

At that time, booting appeared to proceed twice or three times as fast as before. That is by psychological measurement, not physical measurement

However, it has been like that ever since. Debian Etch and Lenny are extremely fast to boot. I even once installed Lenny on I think an AMD 1100, and booting was faster than resuming from hibernate.

No it is not a real benchmark, but for me it indicates that the installation is very lean and efficient.

As for choosing the distro, Lenny is rock stable, and lags only a few weeks on Sid. I recently installed it on a Thinkpad T61, and I had no serious problems with drivers etc. I did have to wait for kernel 2.6.24 to get sound working. But there would have been a workaround available, which I choose not to use.

jlinkels

Well, you could always just suspend/resume forever.

All Linux distros are Linux based. They run the same software. It's just what you have installed. Some distros make it easier to install just what you want. I would vote for debian just because it's pretty easy to start with a barebones install and then just add what you need.

If you are really creative you could start editing some rc files into scripts and speed things a lot if it's really that important.

There was a thread in non-linux General a while ago about Super_Pi and similar programs.

Just thought i would throw my few pennies into the pot,

I have been running Debian Lenny as my main workhorses for about 2 years(servers for a bit longer). Even unstable is mostly stable on most machines.

I have seen that many people have trouble coming to grips with some of the hardware compatibility issues with setting up a new debian system. A couple of small pieces of advice, setup a laptop or something connected to the net so that u can hit google up with questions. Someone else is bound to have had a similar machine if not the same machine before you got it. Go out on the net and look for linux howtos etc... I find Toshiba's laptops and Ibm's laptops are gr8 for it as they have been around for a while. oh, and install modconf. If the kernel drivers aren't built in then module-assistant becomes you friend.


I hope this helps.