There has been a lot of questions on what the fastest distro is and the one kind of speed I'm looking for in a distro is how fast linux calls up various programs. Does there exist a distro that seems to do this faster than all the others or do all of them seem to do this equally?

well i can give you a opinion of mine well i would think he fastest distro of linux well be fedora core 7 an that is my opinion. so you try to google it an find more info about it . an i will try to help

Best idea is to try them. So far for my systems the fastest (being fast and not necessarily easy, which fast was what i was looking for) were from fastest to slowest have been: LFS, Gentoo, Slackware, Puppy, Slax, Fluxbuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Opensuse. Not sure how this list varies from system to system.

The answer mostly depends on what GUI you like - I prefer KDE and that is known to be quite resource hungry, however, it has loads of applets and stuff that I use so I prefer it. For base distributions probably Slackware 12 is 'fastest', however, once it's up and running you have to work a bit harder as there aren't the GUI admin tools to help you. If you're just looking for raw loading speed then why not have a look at PuppyLinux or DSL or one of the distros that loads everything into RAM. They're blistering fast.

If you want blistering speed, you need something which is loaded into the RAM. If you had enough RAM (say 6GB or so) you could make your entire /usr, /bin, /sbin etc. partitions in RAM. This would mean all programs would load more or less as fast as your processor could work. Existing distro's that do this include Puppy, which loads the whole operating system into as little as 128MB RAM (I think). The problem with this approach is that most modern systems don't have enough RAM to do this, and also, you cannot save anything into RAM. This is why we still have disks.

For the more traditional, hard drive based installs, most distro's are going to be similar; their speed is limited by the need to read from a (slow) hard drive, before executing the code.

Hope this helps.

<rant>

one of the magazines did the usual 'which is the best distro' kind of (as usual, not very good) review, and they concluded that SuSE was the fastest of the ones they tested: As this is is a surprising piece of information, let me explain. SuSE had the slowest boot time (and yast is always something other than a speed demon) but in the one sort of speed that you are after, speed at program launch, it did well.

But:
-If you have restricted ram, a small distro will show a sudden speed up against a normally-quick 'big' distro

-OTOH, some of the 'small' distros load entirely into ram (not the whole filesystem necessarily, but everything being executed) and that's a worthwhile speed-up, unless you don't have enough ram, when its probably quite a slow down. I think this is the reason i had a bad experience with 'Mint' (but it was so slow, I didn't bother finding out - 5 mins to open OO and 10 to shut it down. No!)

-Filesystems are a factor here. In very informal testing, I've found xandros good in general use, but my guess is that at least a big part of that was because I took the reiser4 option. My guess is (and I didn't have time to check this) it would be back in the pack if I had gone for ext2 (and resiser4 isn't yet, and may never be, common amongst other distros, to cross-check).

-and, of course, on low cpu systems, reiser4 is a bad choice because it is somewhat cpu intensive

-all the usual speed ups are factors here as is the partition layout and the default set of daemons being run. and kde vs gnome vs something more agile.

So, the thing that rather annoys me is that people are fond of saying things like 'MagicUX is fast, TortoiseWare is slow' without documenting the test conditions (any of the stuff that speeds up/slows down your average distro). Useless!

</rant>

...actually, you did well in defining what sort of speed you wanted; note that most of the replies haven't even addressed that point

(sorry if I've come across as being a grumpy curmudgeon...I should learn to be less realistic)

i agree basically with this fast to slow rating here.

sometimes the time it takes for a program to open depends on what you have been doing on the computer (have you run the program lately) (have you done something very intensive that caused the memory to get cleaned up) and what desktop you are using.

there used to be a project called prelink that could help load times but that seems to not help anymore. no idea why. If programs opening slowly really kills you you may be able to preload some libraries and fix it on any distro.

well i think that fast he is looking for is to make you computer faster an not slow. So i think he is trying to find A OS that spped up his computer.