The perfect distro, what matters the most to you?

[Tsuroerusu]

With the default install, Suse is the slowest and heaviest distro ever. It starts every daemon ever developed since 1994, the GUI is clumsy, and Yast makes me want to kick puppies. People keep mentioning alternative package managers and tweaking can make suse as fast as any other distro, but really, an experience user could make any distro look like any other.

No comment, except: Good luck convincing big companies to use Slackware on servers and desktops.

Go ahead and call me a zealot or something, but I still call bullshit on a synthetic benchmark like that, I have a friend who does everything he can to make his games run faster on Windows, and he does everything from using the 64-bit version to having all the latest stable drivers and stuff, and yet he's never winning a FPS deathmatch at a LAN party, because it doesn't make any difference in real life, because if you stress test something that from the very start is going to be faster, OF COURSE IT'S GOING TO BE FASTER FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!!

thats because the danish are no good a FPS.

I sure ain't, but I prefer games like Mario, Pokémon and other Nintendo stuff any day over any FPS game.

[thetza]

With the default install, Suse is the slowest and heaviest distro ever. It starts every daemon ever developed since 1994, the GUI is clumsy, and Yast makes me want to kick puppies. People keep mentioning alternative package managers and tweaking can make suse as fast as any other distro, but really, an experience user could make any distro look like any other.

No comment, except: Good luck convincing big companies to use Slackware on servers and desktops.

and we all know that techincal superiority consistently means greater market share.

[Tsuroerusu]

With the default install, Suse is the slowest and heaviest distro ever. It starts every daemon ever developed since 1994, the GUI is clumsy, and Yast makes me want to kick puppies. People keep mentioning alternative package managers and tweaking can make suse as fast as any other distro, but really, an experience user could make any distro look like any other.

No comment, except: Good luck convincing big companies to use Slackware on servers and desktops.

and we all know that techincal superiority consistently means greater market share.

Very much so indeed ... not!

[vagrant]

I just wonder if many people make the mistake of confusing minimalism with technical superiority.

[Gomer_X]

3. If you took all the source RPMs for SUSE (Or Fedora, CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise for that matter, are you with me here Gomer?) and recompiled them to match your specific architecture with the same optimization flags as you do in Gentoo, rebuild the ISOs and install that, I'm confident you'll get a similar result if a synthetic benchmark matters that much to you.

Just stripping binaries will give you a smaller memory footprint, and some speedup. I don't think it's worth it.

Fedora is optimized for P4, so I might gain some benefit from recompiling, but I just don't see the point. My systems are very responsive. I never have to wait on anything. There are times my 500Mhz laptop is slow when running a macro on a huge HTML file in Vim, but I'll live.

I'll give Gentoo the speed crown, but I've got all the speed I need.

[Gomer_X]

With the default install, Suse is the slowest and heaviest distro ever. It starts every daemon ever developed since 1994, the GUI is clumsy, and Yast makes me want to kick puppies. People keep mentioning alternative package managers and tweaking can make suse as fast as any other distro, but really, an experience user could make any distro look like any other.

I think that's the point. I know the rationale for starting lots of services in Fedora is that if a n00b would want it, they turn it on (with the exception of insecure services). An experienced user can figure out how to turn off what they don't want, but an inexperienced user doesn't even know they can turn stuff on. They're shooting for a wide audience because they're a general purpose distro. I'm sure SUSE is working from a similar mindset.

Something like Slackware goes for the other extreme and expects you to turn on and configure what you need.

Gentoo expects you to do everything, which works for people who want that.

Personally I like a distro that works OK from a default install, and can be tuned to my needs as I get time. I reinstall every 6 to 9 months, and need a distro that works without configuration right out of the box. Sure, Fedora has too much stuff turned on by default, but I'll fix it when I get to it.

[Tsuroerusu]

3. If you took all the source RPMs for SUSE (Or Fedora, CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise for that matter, are you with me here Gomer?) and recompiled them to match your specific architecture with the same optimization flags as you do in Gentoo, rebuild the ISOs and install that, I'm confident you'll get a similar result if a synthetic benchmark matters that much to you.

Just stripping binaries will give you a smaller memory footprint, and some speedup. I don't think it's worth it.

Fedora is optimized for P4, so I might gain some benefit from recompiling, but I just don't see the point. My systems are very responsive. I never have to wait on anything. There are times my 500Mhz laptop is slow when running a macro on a huge HTML file in Vim, but I'll live.

I agree, I too don't want to spend that much time compiling just to get my apps to eat 5 MB less memory, but if one REALLY wanted to do it, they absolutely could and that was my point.

I'll give Gentoo the speed crown, but I've got all the speed I need.

Yeah, same goes for me, my system boots in 26 seconds, and runs for two weeks until the next storm comes around.

[Shagbag]

I can only come at this topic from the position of a linux 'n00b' having been involved with the OS for only about 18 months now.

As a n00b, ease of use is the most important thing.

I started off with SuSE9.3, then I tried Mandriva2005. Neither one helped me deal with the post-Windows 'cold turkey' I was going through. I read up about Linspire and decided to give it a shot. It worked right out of the box and was as n00b friendly as any of the others I'd come across. I thought the 'tutorials' were absolutely brilliant and CNR was the dog's.
My only complaints were the lack of a custom partition install (I had to wipe my whole HDD for install) and auto login as root (I had to create a non-privileged user AFTER the install process).

SuSE10.0 came out so I tried that. I persisted with it until just recently when I was hearing so much about Ubuntu that I gave it a shot. I haven't looked back since. It seems the perfect distro for the n00b.