I've used Gentoo, Slackware, Suse, and Knoppix. I've spent more time with Gentoo, and the most with Slackware (Which is about a week). Okay, I really liked how Slackware installs unbelievably fast (about 20 minutes), and its installpkg system is fine enough for me atm. Gentoo, on the other hand, the emerge system is great, but doesn't seem much better, if at all, than Slackware. Gentoo's speed is what I question the most. Even though Gentoo's install is not impossible, it's not exactly the least time consuming. I successfully install Gentoo with internet from stage 1 tarball all thanks to the guide, basically just copy what you read. I compiled KDE, but startx still won't work; I know I'm missing something, but atm kind of lazy to look it up. But before I go on any further with Gentoo, if ever, I'd like to know your opinion on the speed increase one could ever notice Gentoo has over Slackware. Is all the compiling really worth it.

***The reason why I tried out Gentoo in the first place was because I was disgusted with Slack's performance. I mean really. I loved how Slack just worked for me when I installed it, but when the performance started dropping, i don't even know. Like my music could be running fine, but if I start downloading, it gets choppy (never did that with Windows XP or 2000). Now I'm not trying to bash, and I'm not saying I dislike Slack, but I just want to find a way to make it more efficient. 91 processes seems ridiculous, but I heard that's normal. When nearly all my 512mb of RAM gets sucked up, I don't understand that either, but I heard that's normal as well. But what really did it for me was when programs were just crashing, and my music got choppy just when downloading. Unbelievable.***

So yeah. I'm gonna stick with Slack or Gentoo. That's that. And to be honest I would prefer to use Slack since it's much easier to install, but I want to be able to multitask. As for Gentoo, I want to know if the speed increase is really that noticeable. If not, I'll stick with Slack for sure, and try to fix it up. If Gentoo really is noticeably faster, I'll probably get back to it at a later time when I'm not so nub. Or I might tackle it now, but help me out and start giving me your opinions on these two popular distros.

IMHO gentoo is much faster not only because you compile all the code to the specifications of your computer but also because less software is install because you only install what you need in gentoo. When I installed Slackware I was amazed how much software was installed. There was 3 different apps to do one task and it would take a long time to uninstall everything I didn't need. Right now I have 95 procs running, I have firefox, liferea (rss reader), thunderbird, xmms, xchat, bluefish, xmule, a few eterms, F@H on a 1ghz AMD Duron and it runs quiet fast and I still have 173 MB of memory left.

Darin3200::I found the same with Debian, I just install the base system and used apt-get to the get the very small amount of apps I use and need. Can't really say that it is Slackware's fault for installing all the fat on your computer though, its just you picked Full Install and didn't go through the package lists to install what you want.....

Linuxnubx::Try a kernel recompile with all the unneccesary options off if you haven't already, my box with Slackware 10.0 and 2.6.7 kernel flies.

Don't believe the gentoo lovers, compiling everything from source gives you nearly unnoticable speed increase.

My opinion: I´ve tried both Gentoo and Debian and to be honest, and compared to a Slackware full install I haven´t seen any difference in speed. (I ran fluxbox with all of them though). Of course in theory Gentoo at least is faster, just that the difference to me wasn´t anything i could notice. And it´s not worth all the compiling time imo, except perhaps if you have a 3ghz p4/amd64 3000+.

The running processes amount can be regulated in any of these distros, in Slackware you have to go through all the config files in /etc/rc.d/ and uncomment/chmod the services you don´t need. For example atd starts as default etc. Once you´ve trimmed the processes you pretty much have the same amount of them on any of the 3 distros.

The memory consumption can´t be read the same way as in windows, as it uses a completely different system. Linux tries to use all memory, it´s just that it can free most of it instantly.

The sound skipping is propably because of the kernel. Are you using the default Slackware kernel? (2.4.26 or 2.6.7?) They are both compiled for a i486 and do not have pre-emptible enabled... Once you´ve compiled your own customized kernel with perhaps some patches (like ck patches if you use it for a desktop) you shouldn´t experience any sound skipping. You can use the 2.6.7 slackware kernel config as a base config, and then edit that. It´s just that Debian and Gentoo use patched (in gentoo there is a vanilla kernel too though) kernels as default, Slackware doesn´t.

If you don´t want bloat, you can always do a slackware minimul install and then use swaret to install everything with dependencies.

All 3 are fine distros though

ps: 93 processes doesn´t sound normal, I have about 40 while being in X/Fluxbox.

I've installed from stage1 plenty of times (and set all the flags), but truthfully, I can't see much difference in speed in Gentoo, Debian, or Slackware. Custom compiled kernels from source don't seem to make a huge difference in speed, either.

Still, I like knowing exactly what's in my box and that everything is streamlined.

if u have kde installed, and ur xorg or xfree86 then:

then startx

What does that do?

Anyways I've used the regular 2.6.7 kernel and customized it for Slackware. Something that I learned while using Gentoo was that I could turn on multiprocessing to activate my hyperthreading. So now I'm going to try that out with Slackware and also turn off pre-empt.

i don't find gentoo to be any faster than slackware, but i do enjoy using gentoo much more. i love the portage system. i don't have much experience with slackware, but portage is a great system and i think i'll stick with gentoo for a long time, regardless of the speed increase or not.