[CS-FSLUG] The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat

[Ed Hurst]

Eduardo Sanchez wrote:

> 1. The fact of this "fat" is more distro-related than 
> desktop-environment related (with the possible exception of GNOME, 
> which I fear is increasingly changing speeds from the rabbit range to 
> the molasses range...). My dad uses at his work KDE 3.0.3 with 
> Slackware 9.0 in a Cyrix 166+ that runs at 133 MHz, using 32 MB of RAM 
> and a 1.0 GB SCSI drive. That KDE (which is admittedly *slower* than 
> the current KDE 3.2.3) runs acceptably fast in that machine.
> 
> 2. You can get a distro full of glitz *and* fast. For example, take 
> Knoppix on hard drive, Libranet, Slackware, etc... My Slack is glitzy, 
> if you want it that way, and is fast. The slow beast here is OO.o, 
> without doubt.
> 
> 3. We *really* need to take the worst offenders to task. For me, 
> RH/Fedora and SUSE are almost out, even in my 2GHz P4, simply because 
> they seem a waste of CPU cycles. And we need to spread this view.

Then we agree. RH/SUSE are marketing to the easy-to-use crowd, which is
where Joe User comes in. Within limits, anything can be faster if you
are willing to tweak -- thus becoming an aficionado. (That dulls your
joke, Jukka :-D )

My Duron 800 will never run fast Linux again, unless I go back to
something like SuSE 8.1, or a stripped-down Slack/Debian/etc. Even then,
I doubt a modern kernel is that much faster on older hardware. Seems to
me most of the attempts at benchmarking are on newer hardware, running
at 1Ghz+. Older stuff simply suffers slower bus speeds, and so forth.
Lotsa RAM just won't help much, because the internal transfer rate is
still slow.

There's no debate here, except over our chosen solutions.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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Software Freedom Day, 28 August 2004
Got Freedom?
http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/
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