The advancement of modern day hardware has made using Gentoo a less time consuming experience.
What would once take days or weeks, now takes hours.
The end result is an optimized system tailored to your needs.
My needs are quite simple, good multimedia functionality, web browsing and office use. So with Gentoo I am able to create a system that can meet my needs and there is the added benefit of that little extra nippy feel and quicker application load times.
Initially I was relying on default use flags set by the kde desktop profile, lets look at an emerge --info output for this profile.
USE="X a52 aac acl acpi alsa amd64 berkdb bluetooth branding bzip2 cairo cdr cli consolekit cracklib crypt cups cxx dbus dri dts dvd dvdr emboss encode exif fam firefox flac fortran gdbm gif gpm gtk hal iconv ipv6 jpeg kde lcms ldap libnotify mad mikmod mmx mng modules mp3 mp4 mpeg mudflap multilib ncurses nls nptl nptlonly ogg opengl openmp pam pango pcre pdf perl png ppds pppd python qt3support qt4 readline reflection sdl session spell spl sse sse2 ssl startup-notification svg sysfs tcpd tiff truetype unicode usb vorbis x264 xcb xml xorg xulrunner xv xvid zlib"
It seems like a lot but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. If a software package has support for ipv6 and it is defined in your use flags, it will be built to support it. If however, it doesn’t have support for ipv6 it wont magically be built in.
I was quite happy with the performance my Gentoo install had using the kde desktop profile but decided to see if I could improve it. So after much tweaking I was able to reduce the use flags to the following,
USE="3dnow X a52 aac acpi alsa amd64 bzip2 cairo cdr cli consolekit cracklib crypt cups cxx dbus dri dts dvd dvdr encode exif firefox flac gif gpm hal jpeg kde libnotify mad mmx modules mp3 mp4 mpeg mudflap multilib ncurses ogg opengl pam pcre pdf perl png ppds python qt3support qt4 readline reflection samba sdl session spell sse sse2 ssl startup-notification svg sysfs tcpd tiff truetype usb vorbis x264 xcb xml xorg xv xvid zlib"
So what was the outcome?
The outcome was, packages had fewer dependencies and as a result a few less packages were installed.
Performance / memory consumption wise, absolutely no difference.
Not that I expected to see any. Most of the 485+ packages I happen to have installed use few to none of the use flags.
You can only tweak your system so far. Beyond that you are only engaging in a pointless exercise.
Based on my experience, I see no point in trying to tweak the kde desktop profile.
Infact I am now wondering what would happen if I build all packages to support as much as possible, which is what all your major distributions do.
Will I notice a difference?
I have my doubts.
I stated above that the modern day hardware has made using Gentoo a less time consuming experience but there is also another consequence of having more powerful hardware.
As software packages support more and are built with more functionality, its code size typically increases. Memory consumption therefore goes up and so does execution time. However modern day hardware is having a counter effect on these negative aspects.
Modern day hardware can process code quicker and more memory is readily available. So despite your binary distribution being compiled with generic optimizations and software packages being built to support as much as possible, the performance in most cases is getting better providing your system isn’t old.
Gentoo has lost its appeal on the performance front because for many users the gain ranges from minor to negligible. When you also take into consideration to time it takes to setup / update Gentoo, it simply isn't worth it.
Infact what is the general consensus concerning Gentoo today?
Is it about performance or control?
Interestingly, OpenSUSE 11.3 was released not so long ago and the performance is very nippy. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do.
My utter disappointment with OpenSUSE 11.2 (it was very sluggish) is what made me try out Gentoo.
Funnily enough, OpenSUSE 11.3 has changed some of my thoughts about Gentoo.
I once said,
"Gentoo, If you have the time and are willing to put in the effort then why not?"
I now say, because the gain is so small it becomes a pointless effort.
OpenSUSE 11.3 takes 10 to 15 minutes to install and performance is great. Even though I can still feel a little more nippiness in Gentoo and applications load that bit quicker, common sense rules in favour of OpenSUSE.
A superb effort by the OpenSUSE team, they have delivered a well polished and professional product with good performance.
I still believe Gentoo is the most innovating distribution to exist, their package management portage is truly a piece of art. The level of control, the ability to tailor the system and the learning experience cannot be matched by anything else.
The only problem is I am just using it for the wrong reason.
Gentoo and KDE 4.4.5 - A snapshot of the past...
Gentoo isn't about performance, that is only a side effect. The real power behind Gentoo is it's control.
Hi, I am wandering what video card are you using, because openSuSE 11.3 has major issues with intel video cards. Freezes, screen corruption, low performance. With nvidia there are also issues.
ReplyDeleteI am using an Nvidia 9600GSO. I have been reading about such issues but I myself have not encountered any.
ReplyDeleteI do not use the drivers provided through yast, perhaps this may be why?
The drivers I use are 256.44 (x86_64) from www.nvidia.com
If you are using an nvidia card, is there a specific event that causes freezing / pauses?
Have you tried Arch Linux? It's philosophy is similar to Gentoo, i.e. bare-bone core system, user have a great control over the system. But the packages are binary and you don't have to spend hours compiling things.
ReplyDeleteIf there's some piece of software that would benefit from a custom build, you can easily build it from source using the ports-like Arch Build System.
With Nvidia I do not have freezes, but display corruption and artefacts are frequent. There is no specific issue. The card is 8500GT and the driver is not from repos, I downloaded it from nvidia.com
ReplyDeleteHowever, I do not whant to wait for stability to increase in 11.3, so this evening I downgraded the machine with nvidia card to 11.2. Tomorrow maybe the same fate will catch the intel video machine also. At least it works.
Just for example - with the same driver under 11.2 I have no artefacts on the screen, no coruption. Also in glxgears, the fps spiked from 2500 to 4200 just from the downgrade. On both installs I am using KDE 4.5 with bluring disabled. I think there is something wrong with xorg in 11.3
Oh I forgot, I also tried Arch, it is nice, but it is not really good idea to use beta packets just for the sake of bleeding edge. Both firefox and thunderbird were beta, and if you want to install non-beta packets, you still need to compile from source. Also since Arch do not use standard packet system a lot of software is available only as source, if there is no one, which had the need for the software and the idea of creating a packet. So back to compilation it is. Besides AUR uses compilation anyway.
ReplyDeleteI have just updated my OpenSUSE 11.3 install to KDE 4.5 and so far it is working well :-)
ReplyDeleteAs for Arch, I can see the appeal especially for those with lower end / older systems.
But if you have a relatively powerful system, you may as well spend that little bit of extra time and go with Gentoo.
I am using Kubuntu 10.04 and was using your instructions to create a kernel and everything went well till I typed make menuconfig when I got the message "no rule to make target". Could you fill me in on what a target is and why I get this after the make command.
ReplyDeletethank You
Hello Timothy,
ReplyDeleteMy guess is you are not in your linux source directory, which is why you get the error.
Can you type in the terminal,
pwd
and paste what is says, this will show me what directory you are in.
define source directory please
ReplyDeleteThe source directory is the folder where you have extracted the linux-source file.
ReplyDeleteThis is a snippet of the guide, I have numbered the steps.
1. mkdir ~/src
2. cd ~/src
3. apt-get source linux-image-$(uname -r)
4. cd linux-2.6.32
At step 3, we have installed the linux source file.
At step 4, we are entering the linux source directory.
You have to be inside this folder for the make menuconfig command to work.
With the guide I wrote, you literally just have to copy and paste the commands but where indicated modify the bits in green.
With NVIDIA I can only suffer lots of pain with OpenSuSE. I was able to crash a LiveCD while trying to change my desktop background, NVIDIA binary drivers crash a lot, trying to switch to the terminal while running X is a guaranteed crash, and this strain of pain has happened since OpenSuSE 11 to me. And, what makes it more strange: all this pain doesn't appear with Fedora, Arch, Sabayon, Gentoo or Ubuntu.
ReplyDeleteIf you use NVIDIA, avoid OpenSuSE like the plague.