Hi all.

I'm about to reformat my older PC. I will install linux. I'm torn between two distros, and what I want to know is, which one will perform faster? I just want my programs to load quickly, and to be able to run some RAM-intensive apps like photoshop with good speed.

The two distros I'm considering are Kubuntu and Mepis. Does anyone sorta know if one will run abit faster than the other? I don't care about boot speed really, just the speed while I'm working. Keep in mind, I odn't mean ancient computer here, it's AMD 2500+ with a gig RAM and radeon graphics.

Thanks for any advice.

Given that most distros of a given period use the same major kernel version (it's actually this that is called Linux), I'd say the application prog used is more important.
YMMV

Also Mepis is based un Ubuntu, isn't it? and Kubuntu pretty much is Ubuntu. ??

with a gig of ram it doesn't really matter, Mepis and Kubuntu are basically the same. why don't you install both and see which one is faster

Choose a distribution that gives you the option Debian does. Debian is by far the best distributions in my arsenal when it comes to a serious hard worker/performer. When I do forensics work on hard drive images, I can end up producing folders with 150.000 .jpg photo files in it. All my distribution choke trying to open a folder like that, except Debian. That's just one example of many I can come up with when ranting about my Debians.
Debian gives me the option to install a base minimal installation, then I just add the packages I need. When I installed Fedora 7 the other day, I tried to lean it out, then before installing the system it said "resolving dependencies", then turned around and installed 965 packages. When I installed Debian testing on my laptop, the base installation was 145 packages, then to bring it up to a lean mean machine with a desktop, amarok playing my mp3s, icerodents galore, forensics and hacker tools etc., I don't think it comes near 500 packages.
Both my Debians are "KICK ASS" power houses because they don't have all the fat.

That was random ...


Cheers,
Tink

why don't try this, i hope it can help you.

1. make a ramdisk with 300MB.
2. mount it into a folder.
3. copy content of the program you want to run into ramdisk
4. run the program from the folder (you can use ln -s or other method as long as the program can run from ramdisk)

if it help, please tell us how you do it.
check this : http://www.lissot.net/partition/ramdisk.html
Regards,
Ks

And just as random :}

Taking valuable buffer/cache space away from the OS
in the hopes that a single application which after
the copy to RAM disk would be in the buffers anyway
will be faster the first time round you start it?



Cheers,
Tink

Allrighty, thanks for all the help guys. Sorry it took me forever to get back at you, i've been incredibly busy. I've decided to stick with mepis, but I will have to get the newest release, I gave my ditro disc to a friend. Cheers.

Yes, basically--when you've seen one "buntu", you seen them all....

Kubuntu is Ubuntu, but with KDE
Mepis is Ubuntu without the stupid "no-root-user" thing.

And, they're ALL just Debian....

It's been one year since I finally replaced Windows XP on my computer with Kubuntu, and started using Linux full-time.

Five weeks after I started using Kubuntu, I tried Mepis 6.0, and found it to be much more complete and user-friendly. In fact, to me, Mepis felt like what Kubuntu SHOULD have been, or maybe COULD have been, if it hadn't been relegated to second-class citizenship (after Ubuntu) by Canonical.

I've been using Mepis 6.5 ever since it came out. I know that Kubuntu has been upgraded once or twice in the past year, too, but once I tried Mepis, I never wanted to go back to Kubuntu again.

(BTW, I never noticed any speed difference between Kubuntu and Mepis. My PC is an Athlon XP running at 1731 MHz with 1 GB RAM.)

Just install Slackware.

I second the Slackware vote -- it has been the most responsive and fastest-feeling distro I've used to date. It's very lean and mean. Ubuntu and Mepis both seemed more sluggish to me.

DISCLAIMER: It's been a while since I used Ubuntu (6.06 LTS) and even longer since I used Mepis (like 2004) They're probably a lot faster than I remember them. My personal preference, however, is Slackware