That's very close to the truth.

I tried to install gentoo myself on a Pentium4 1700MHZ 256Kb cache with 256 MB RAM.
I did all the optimizations possible (march=Pentium4 -pipe -O3 e.t.c). Compiled glibc with nptl support,
prelinked everything, starting from stage 1 (bootstrapping), used various hacks and tweaks as I found on their wiki and in gentoo forums (saving many checks at boot up and working with hdparm - dma enabled). Installed a full KDE station. Probably there must be some better optimizations than I did, but I really tried to do my best.
In both slackware and gentoo I've compiled kernel-2.6.9, with the same (almost) config file.

What do you think was the result?
My xp boots in 34 seconds (until the busy cursor disappears)
My gentoo boots in 55 seconds (until I can use KDE)
Slackware boots in 1 minute, 5 seconds ( until I can use KDE - as in gentoo, the system logs automatically into kde).
I tried to make the boot up process as similar as possible on both distroes.

I hardly can feel any difference between gentoo and slackware. Though I think compilation on gentoo works a bit faster.

I have to mention that gentoo was installed on an older hard drive - 5800 rpm (can it be so crucial?)


The results were disappointing for me, and my conclusion is that kde is damn slow no matter how you compile it (on gentoo fluxbox appears in 29 seconds). And of course Slackware or some other binary distributions are optimized enough as they are. There is really no point in compiling everything from scratch, it's rather an illusion that many people tend to cherish.

Wow, it's good to hear some input from Gentoo users. I've been wanting to try out Gentoo for a while now... but from what I've read, the benefits of compiling a system from scratch for a specific arch seem negligible. It sounds like it would take years of 686 to make up for the time spent compiling. Anyway, it seems like it might be a fun project. Seriously though, and to get back to the topic, Slackware has taught me more about linux than I would have ever hoped to know. I spent my first year or so using hand-holding distros like SuSE and Mandrake. They're both fantastic in their own right--easy to use wm based OS's. But now that I've used slack for a while, they almost seem like a waste. You don't really get to know your system until you use slack. Whoah...that wasn't the point of the thread either. As far a speed goes, it depends what you run. I've scaled down my kernel as far as I can and I still can't get it to boot as fast as my Windows box. And that's booting to the command line without ldconfig and hotplugging--it's still slower. But once it's up and running, there's no comparison. Fluxbox with a good keys file will run circles around most anything.

I run slack on my 400mhz compaq. that's my everyday machine. Sure KDE (or gnome for that matter) can get sluggish. But it's still fast enough. It feels like mandrake on my 1.2ghz or something. I'm very impressed with slackware. Gentoo seems like a fun challenge, but in the end you might not want to bother with the compilation (although I do compile KDE myself). Btw, I think there's Gentoo stage 3 which is mostly precompiled, so you might want to check that out.

My idea of "hardcore linux"
is not "emerge <package>" ... its more along the lines of
tar -xzvf <package.tar.gz>
./configure
resolve dependencies manually
./configure && make && make install

You can print out a whole gentoo installation guide and run through it step by step, but it doesnt do much for understanding the what or the why. Plus, once you've got it set up, its like you never have to hack it again. It sounds too easy (which is partly why it has such a large appeal) but easy isnt always good. Microsoft tries to make everything easy, and what do you get, you get a product that is dumbed down, stripping alot of functionality for the sake of "user friendliness."

Just my $0.02

I run both Slack and Windows on a PII 453Mhz box with 512 megs of RAM.

I've had some minor experience with other distro's (SuSE, Mandrake), and although Slack does have one heck of a learning curve, I've learned more about linux after 3 days of running Slack than I had learned about Windows in my first month of running it. (many, many moons ago)

Even burnt off Slax to use as a rescue disk if anything breaks. (I just mount my /dev/hdb1 as the Slax home directory, and I have full rw access from the disk)

And Slack (full install, with KDE as the default) is still faster than Windows.

cool cool. i'm gonna try slack then.

I agree following a guide is not 'hardcore', but it is certainly more hands on that a nearly automated RedHat or SuSe install. At least a user is exposed to the commands and sees what they do in Gentoo.

Emerge is great, and nearly every distro has a system as such for automatically downloading packages for that distro. Emerge isn't the only way to skin a cat in Gentoo.

Funny. I wasn't overly impressed with Gentoo myself. With the install process especially. You can do that while you sleep. Kind of like using apt-get to completely install Redhat if you could. LFS is "Hard Core" linux..... Good choice tarun_s on Slackware.

Not to say that you shouldn't atleast try gentoo sometime.....