Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo's advantage: "optimized for your system" -- huh?

[Dale]

Saphirus Sage wrote:
> Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> Whenever I see a write-up of Gentoo, it's describe as a system
>> similar to BSD "ports" where you build packages from source.
>> The main benefit claimed for this approach is that you get
>> better performance because all executables are optimized for
>> exactly the right instruction set.
>>
>> Where did that bit of apocrypha come from, and why is it
>> parroted by so many people?
>>
>> AFAICT, the "performance" benefit due to compiler optimization
>> is practically nil in real-world usage.
>>
>> In my experience the huge benefit of source-based distros such
>> as Gentoo is elimination of the library dependency-hell that
>> mires other binary-based distros.
>>
>> For many years I ran RedHat and then Mandrake.  After a year or
>> so, they became impossible to maintain because of library
>> version conflicts.  Every time I tried up upgrade an RPM package
>> to fix a bug or security hole, it required a handful of
>> libraries to be upgraded, but doing that would break a bunch of
>> other RPMs for which upgrades weren't available. The solution
>> was always to start building stuff from sources.  Once you
>> started doing that, the package manager would get upset because
>> it doesn't know about some stuff that's installed (unless you
>> built from source RPMs, which had another set of problems).
>>
>> The second benefit is that with Gentoo, upgrading a system
>> actually works over the long-run.  With RedHat/Mandrake, things
>> would gradually deteriorate to the point where the system was
>> unmaintainable, but attempting to upgrade between major
>> releases was always futile.  I've had Gentoo machines that have
>> been upgraded for 4-5 years without any significant problems
>> (failed hard-drives don't count).
>>
>> The third main benefit I've seen is that there are vastly more
>> packages available for Gentoo.  Putting together and
>> maintaining an ebuild appears to take a lot less work than
>> putting together and maintaining a binary RPM package.  I've
>> had far fewer problems with third party ebuilds than I did with
>> third-party RPMs (on the rare occasions when I found one for
>> some obscure application I wanted to run).  Again, the solution
>> was always "build from sources".
>>
>> Are the real benefits of Gentoo too hard to explain to the
>> unwashed masses, so instead they're told the fairy tale about
>> imporoved performance?
>>
>>
>>
>
> Being a metadistribution, the concept of higher performance isn't quite
> that much of a fairy tale. If you can easily configure your system to a
> specific purpose, that would ideally lead to better performance, whether
> it be due to the specialization of the system or at least a placebo
> effect on the user. Gentoo is honestly my first linux system, so I don't
> really have the experience of library conflicts of binary distros.
> People in general will usually just want confirmation that something has
> benefits over what they currently have, irregardless of evidence of
> exactly why it is better, so that may be part of why so many supporters
> "parrot" the same view regarding Gentoo.  On the other hand, I just take
> a lot of it as peace of mind in that all the responsibility for how my
> system is running is directly mine, as opposed to being able to blame
> someone who made a bad RPM. I like knowing any little factor of my
> system and what it's doing.
>
>
>

I'll also add this info.  I switched from Mandrake to Gentoo a long time
ago.  Mandrake was slow and took a good while to login and open larger
apps.  Gentoo on the exact same machine runs way faster.  Login is a LOT
faster, especially the second time around since it is cached, and apps
start a lot faster too. 

You do have to have a set of sane FLAGS for this to work but it can be
faster depending on how much time you spend looking up the correct settings.

Dale

:-)  :-)