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I'm a long time fan of Ubuntu. I've played with Fedora, OpenSUSE, MEPIS, and some other distros. I'm looking to play again with something new just for the fun of it.

I've recently tried Arch for the first time using Virtual Box. I must say...it's amazingly quick. I couldn't believe it especially since I was using Virtual Box.

I was wondering if there are any distros out there with this kind of performance but with better stability (as far as updates go and such) similar to Ubuntu. If I liked the distro enough, I'd like to be able to use it for my production machine. I'm open ended as far as GNOME or KDE based distro, but I do prefer deb based over rpm.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations.

Give Sidux a shot

TBH, over the past year, I've had many, many more issues with ubuntu than I have with Arch.

Have you tried good ole Debian ? or even the shows undisputed favourite slackware?

I recommend giving Gentoo a shot. It's not for everyone, but I personally think it's the most challenging and rewarding distro I've ever used, and it's also the most fun.

To be fair, it's not for the Ubuntu crowd, but for anyone looking to squeeze the maximum amount of performance out of their machine, and for people who like easy access to the latest and greatest packages without needing to re-install, I think it's unmatched. There's also a level of stability and configurability not found on most other binary-based distributions. Portage also sh!ts on just about every other package maintenance system out there, with APT really being the only exception.

If you do attempt a Gentoo install, use the standard minimal installation media, and follow the handbook for doing a stage 3 install. The live CD installer is pretty much broken at this point. They really should take it down since it tarnishes Gentoo's image of quality, and tends to discourage potential new users.

Hey everyone. Thanks for the suggestions. I tried Slackware and Debian many years ago when I had a ComCrap laptop. At the time, the only distro that worked very well was RedHat. I think I'll give those two a shot again. I'll also check out Sidux and Gentoo. I've wanted to try Gentoo out, but have heard how it take a long time to install. I'll throw that on a test machine I recently acquired.

Again, thanks for all the good suggestions.

mobius111001 wrote:Hey everyone. Thanks for the suggestions. I tried Slackware and Debian many years ago when I had a ComCrap laptop. At the time, the only distro that worked very well was RedHat. I think I'll give those two a shot again. I'll also check out Sidux and Gentoo. I've wanted to try Gentoo out, but have heard how it take a long time to install. I'll throw that on a test machine I recently acquired.

Again, thanks for all the good suggestions.

Just for a heads up, you will be waiting awhile to compile anything desktop-related. You really want at least a 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 for compiling things like KDE and Firefox. But nowadays, with dual and quad-core systems becoming the norm, compiling is really quite trivial.

mobius111001 wrote:I do prefer deb based over rpm.

Even so, I would recommend that you took a look at Fedora 8 (In case you havn't tried a version post Fedora Core 6). Heck, you said you were looking for something to try "just for the fun of it".

Also, you might even want to have a look at some of the BSDs. I use OpenBSD A LOT, and have been really pleased with it for the entire time I've been using it. I use it on my web server and DNS server, which are both Pentium 3, Dell Optiplex boxes. I also use it on my Mac mini and an old Pentium 3 IBM Aptiva box. I also run FreeBSD on what I refer to as my consolidation server, because of FreeBSD's excellent jail feature making it very easy to run many things on the same box, but completely separated into separate system environments.

If you decide to give OpenBSD a go, do yourself a favor (Like I did when I first tried it) and read this guide: http://www.openbsd101.com.
Because the OpenBSD installer can be a bit daunting to people who have not tried it before (Although it's fairly simple once you've gone through it two or three times). FreeBSD might be easier if you've never tried BSD before, also I hear the upcoming 7.x is gonna feature some pretty impressive SMP performance improvements.

Wally Balljacker wrote:I
To be fair, it's not for the Ubuntu crowd, but for anyone looking to squeeze the maximum amount of performance out of their machine,

ROFL , i tried Gentoo about a year ago and i did not see any noticeable performance gains.
The real advantage is that you can choose what options the applications will have, then again there is apt-build on Debian which is the same thing.

Try it and i guarantee that after a week of getting up to day , your give up.
I find Fedora pushes the latest packages before any distro , whenever there is a bug of any kind in a application, fedora will push the latest version with the bug fixed instead of backporting the fix.

allix wrote:

Wally Balljacker wrote:I
To be fair, it's not for the Ubuntu crowd, but for anyone looking to squeeze the maximum amount of performance out of their machine,

ROFL , i tried Gentoo about a year ago and i did not see any noticeable performance gains.
The real advantage is that you can choose what options the applications will have, then again there is apt-build on Debian which is the same thing.

Try it and i guarantee that after a week of getting up to day , your give up.
I find Fedora pushes the latest packages before any distro , whenever there is a bug of any kind in a application, fedora will push the latest version with the bug fixed instead of backporting the fix.

From my experience with Gentoo, it does run noticeably snappier than distros like Ubuntu and Debian, simply because, 1.) I'm running a custom kernel that is lean and efficient, so I don't end up with tons of useless kernel modules being loading when I start the machine, and 2.) Gentoo doesn't automatically start up any non-essential boot services, so I end up with a clean and slick boot up. Debian is the absolute WORST when it comes to boot bloat. Every damn module and daemon gets loaded automatically.

As for apt-build, I've used it. It works well enough, although I see no reason to actually use it on a daily basis. After "apt-building" a package, you end up with the same exact package as if you had installed the binary the normal way. The whole appeal of Portage is that you can specify compile flags and turn off features you don't want or need. Debian's tools weren't that sophisticated last time I used them.

Oh, and I almost forgot one of the killer advantages of Portage, the "/etc/portage/package.keywords" file. Any time you want a brand new bleeding edge version of a package, simply add it to that configuration file, and emerge away. Since you're compiling the package locally against whatever library versions you happen to have installed, you avoid most of the dependency issues altogether that plague Debian testing/unstable.

Why not try vanilla Debian or Slackware. Those are my choices behind Ubuntu and Arch.

Oh - I forgot my recommendations:

Frugalware - much like arch, but comes with some fantastic artwork OOTB, and packman/PKGBUILD is modified. Small userbase and dead fora, though - the mailing lists average about .25 emails a month. I understand the devs are active on IRC, though - they have always been very responsive to email.

PCLinuxOS - a strong contender for the worst name for a distro I have ever heard. Based on mangina, er, mandriva, at least to some extent. Well put together distro with all the drake tools, and some nice artwork - well polished. Smallish, but very active and friendly/n00b friendly fora community. Most stuff "just works" ootb. It is rpm based, but they use apt-4-rpm for package management.

Oops,

And Zenwalk. Slack with polish, essentially. Fast, fast, fast, and minimalist, though last time I installed it, it came with most of what I want/need in a distro. I admit that I do not care for slackware's brand of package management, but IIRC, the Zenwalk folks were working on a new package manager, or at least a more userfriendly comprehensive way to manage packages. It reminds me of Rubix Linux, which I still have a small place in my heart for. Nice artwork/polish. I much prefer it to any of the other slack polishers I've tried.

Hell, this is making me nostalgic. I may give some of these a whirl on my testing box this weekend, come to think of it - I have a 4 day block of idle time coming up, the first in a long assed time, and my "thanksgiving" is slated to ve a small family deal. Good time to geek out for the first time in, literally, months.

Wally Balljacker wrote: From my experience with Gentoo, it does run noticeably snappier than distros like Ubuntu and Debian, simply because, 1.) I'm running a custom kernel that is lean and efficient, so I don't end up with tons of useless kernel modules being loading when I start the machine, and 2.) Gentoo doesn't automatically start up any non-essential boot services, so I end up with a clean and slick boot up. Debian is the absolute WORST when it comes to boot bloat. Every damn module and daemon gets loaded automatically.

I boot up a system and leave it running 24/7 , only time i reboot is if a new kernel comes out or go away on holiday or something and boot it up when i come back.
The exception is a laptop. However i can wait 20 more seconds ....

If you are trying something for fun, I will recommend my current favorite.

Foresight

Foresight has up to date applications, and "rollback" in their package manager. Which means, something breaks after an update, you simple issue the command, "sudo conary rollback 1" and you have the fully functional machine you had before the update broke things. I don't think you can get a better combination of up to date and stability than that.

Although I would grant that Fedora 8, Debian, and Slackware are all great suggestions too. The Slackware, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Gentoo are all great suggestions if you really want to grow in learning Linux or Unix like operating systems. I ran Slackware for about 6 months with that result. I should probably run it again to relearn some of the things I learned the last time, but forgot after using "easier" distros like Ubuntu, Fedora 7, and now Foresight.