Opinions Needed

[Bob Raymond]

On Fri, 10 May 2002 08:11:57 -0400
"Brian Witowski" <brianw at torchlake.com> wrote:

> Suse is supposedly built specifically for Intel processors.  Are there any
> real-world advantages or is it just fluff?

SuSE I think is built with 486 optimizations.  I don't really have any definitive benchmarking results, but running a full install, all packages, of 7.3 Pro, was remarkably faster on an AMD Athlon 1.4, 512MB SDRAM, Radeon 8500, EPoX 8KTA3Pro with VIA KT133A desktop than on a P4 1.8ghz, 256mb DDR, Mobility Radeon 7500, Intel 830M notebook, and I upgraded XFree to 4.2.0 just to make things a little better, so the laptop's 7500 did have 3D accel.  That only gave it a higher glxgears "score," but otherwise no improvement.  I guess, then, it's only Intel optimized to the point where it won't run on a 386 or a Sparc, PPC, Alpha, etc (except for the Sparc and PPC versions).

> Also, whats the general opinion of Gentoo thus far?  I think Portage is
> awsome.  The need for an internet connection is a drawback but it also has
> many advantages.  My Gentoo install seems much less bloated and runs quite
> smoothly.  Including KDE3.

I've got Gentoo on that Athlon 1.4 now.  It's about twice as fast as SuSE 7.3.  I think it's a combination of the full optimization from the beginning and the switch from reiserfs to XFS.  One complaint is that sound worked for a while, then I did that little rm -rf /etc trick, and lo and behold, no sound in KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, or anything else (except for the speaker pop on driver initialization).  SuSE did at least give me a reinstall option if I hosed everything, but Gentoo on 28.8k is living just a bit dangerously.
 
> Brian
> 
> 

Bob Raymond