Le 25.01.2014 03:17, tom arnall a écrit :
I am looking for the fastest Linux distro for the following purposes.
System:
Dell latitude D630
dual core
2g memory
most used applications:
icewm
gnome-terminal
vim
perl
chrome browser
transmission
Currently I am running ubuntu 12.04. I am unhappy with the speed of
it.
Any info/suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
We can not reply to your question, because it is incomplete.
All distros make a choice between:
* time the user have to spend to install, configure and maintain,
* user's knowledge,
* freshness of packages ( with problems of too recent or too old
softwares, indeed )
* effective speed of the system.
Debian is interesting, and maybe the best choice for my needs, because
it allows me to tinker a lot to have a minimal system. Install it
without any option at first, then on your first run, just use aptitude,
disable "automatically install recommended softwares" and select the
tools you need one by one.
If you wants it on your desktop, for simple uses which are not
critical, testing is very good: less outdated than stable, and I have
seen less breakages than in unstable, and those breakages are probably
due to the fact I am a dependency nazi. I send every package I do not
know why they are on my system in the void, which can happen to break
features I need, but I have seen lot of powerful computers running so
slowly compared to my netbook...
Also, if you want speed, forget about classic DEs: unity, gnome, kde
are not built for speed, they are built to be easy to use. You want
speed? You have to take time to discover exactly which features you
need, and to select softwares which does not implement features you do
not need.
My personal choices:
opera ( web browsing ), lxterminal, i3-wm ( if you are a keyboard lover
and have more than one screen - or only small ones - then you *need* it
) , mpd, mpc, ncmpcpp, galculator, vim, transmission, skype, mumble,
clang, git, meld, dia and ssh, aptitude, lilo, and some games. Probably
some other minor tools, too, for programming.
This selection implied lot of time spent into removing bloated stuff
like file explorers, in testing ( I spent the most time testing web
browsers, text editors, terminal emulators and window managers ).
Using a mix between stable and testing on my desktop (I need at least a
computer to be usable everytime ), and unstable/experimental on my
netbook.
If you have plenty of time and knowledge, you can try LFS ( linux from
scratch ) or gentoo. But since you come from Ubuntu, I very doubt that
it can be recommended to you. Those distros* needs a deep knowledge of
internals of your computer. They'll require you to compile everything**
so you will be able to select the exact optimization options you want
and the precise instruction set of your processor.
You will earn some CPU cycles ( I *did not* said that this will be
measurable )... but will spend hours to get them. Those options are the
fastest distros you could have. It will also give you the really last
version of softwares, since it is built from source directly, so you can
even choose to build from development repositories.
There are some other source distros around: source mage, sorcerer,
funtoo...
Then, you have some distros like archlinux, which needs a little less
knowledge, but still lot of time. Arch is a rolling release distro, with
the problems it gives: when you update your system, you *have to* read
the notes, or it can break everything. Some will say I troll, and some
others will give you real stories about such failures.
AFAIK, fedora needs far less time and is more stable, but since I was
never really interested by it, I can not give you any opinion about it (
I have at least tried to install each other I speak about here ).
And you came from Ubuntu, which, with some others like mint, is only
built to give an easy to use system, with almost no administration
tasks. You can not have something tailored for your needs with such
mind, but you won't have any brain damage to choose between alternatives
for your software, or by trying to configure them.
On this list, we probably have ours brains a little damaged, especially
people which used Debian in it's first days ;) freedom can hurt, you
know.
So, really, you did not asked your question correctly.
How many time do you have?
How many knowledge do you have?
Do you need shiny, very recent softwares?
Do you prefer stable stuff or fast ones?
To conclude this long mail, I will give you a link:
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php
This is a website which will asks you the same questions as me, plus
some others, and which will give you some hint about what distro could
be the good one for your needs. Just note that it is not really a very
recent test, and it have been made by humans and so results contains
opinions.
You can also use distrowatch to read a little about the distros it will
advice you to use, and/or wikipedia articles about them.
This way, you will have an idea of the picture, and may be able to have
a not too bad choice.
*: note that LFS is not a real distro, but a book about how to build
your own distro
**: I have read that, for gentoo, there are now some packages with
binaries, so not really everything...
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