Feb 28 2008
Gentoo Linux?
On the heels of my raving about Gentoo, I find that while from and administrative perspective I like it, from a user perspective? Not so much.
I have two workstations at work. One is a Celeron 1.7ish, 1.5GB of RAM, running Windows XP. The internal web sites we use tend toward lots of javascript, plus another application that sucks up resources. Thus Firefox, when viewing our ticket system, our order database system and our server locator / user database system was running very sluggish.
I managed to acquire a second desktop, a P4 1.8Ghz, 1GB RAM system, on which I intended to install Linux. When I got that far, I installed Gentoo, running Xfce4, as a learning exercise. Everything went beautifully. Once I got Firefox and Thunderbird installed, I moved all my work that that system, using the Windows box only for the non-web based application that only has a Windows client. And since the speakers are hooked up to that system, I left Pidgin there as well.
The performance of Firefox on the Linux box is barely a marginal improvement.
My personal laptop, however, a Centrino 1.6 with 512MB of RAM running Ubuntu 7.10 and Gnome, running all the same web sites is at least 3x more responsive.
I even made sure I had exactly the same addons installed on the two Linux systems. By all lights, the Gentoo box should be smoking the laptop.
It’s got a faster (model) processor.
It has a faster (clock rate) processor.
It has 2x the RAM.
It’s got an “optimized” OS installed.
It’s running the light-weight Xfce4 window manager, compared to Gnome’s (and all the other bells and whistles I’ve installed) bloat.
The only thing I can figure is there’s something about the default compile settings Gentoo uses when building Firefox.
I must remember to reboot the Gentoo box and check if Hyperthreading is turned off in the BIOS. I’m running an SMP kernel but only seeing one CPU. I also need to check if a P4 1.8 has HT support…
I like Gentoo a lot, because it’s very much like FreeBSD — you can build a bare-bones system, and then add only what you need, as you need it.
I found out the hard way that it’s terrible for production machines, though, because the Gentoo team changes things so often, you are likely to find services breaking every time you do an update.
Those are exactly the reasons I started playing with it. Adding that when you do need to add something, it’s very easy, unlike some more prominent Linux distros I’ve played with (think getting any kind of video, or mp3 support, working)
It seems to mix the best of FreeBSD and Linux: the FreeBSD package management / build system, with the Linux kernel and GNU tools. (I say “best of” on the Linux side only because, having used them much more than FreeBSD, I’m more familiar and comfortable with, say, iptables than pf).
Like you, I found that while it might make a good server (where you’re not updating every day), it’s got a way to go for the desktop. I don’t want to wait 6 hours while my desktop builds X and Gnome, then another 3 to build Firefox.
It was Firefox taking hours to build, then running like a sloth that caused me to give up on it, at least on any desktop where I need to get work done. I’ve switched my work desktop to Ubuntu, which I’ve been using on various machines for a couple of years now.