On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 11:17:15 -0400 Art wrote: > >It does run faster, especially when compared with XP (which is > >terribly slow thanks to the very "useful" animations and eye-candy). > >But you haven seen all of it. Among distributions, SuSE is not the > >fastest there is, and also the desktop environment a newbie like you > >is likely to run (i.e. KDE and its applications) can be considered > >bloated and slow by linux standards. You have a choice (or rather, > >you'll have a choice once you're more experienced with GNU/Linux), > >you can use lighter environments (a Windowmanager), and lighter and > >faster applications. > > My purchase of SUSE was impulsive. I'd been told by my DP staff that > I should go with Redhat but I saw SUSE sitting there on the shelf and > > bought it. It did not occur to me that the GUI I'll need to run to > get anything useful out of Linux is bloated.
Don't misunderstand that as having to do something with the performance of SuSE being under par. If SuSE is slow compared to other distros it is no slower than Red Hat, and the bloated GUI you use on SuSE is bloated on Red Hat as well. They are both rpm-based binary distributions. There are other types of distros as well. For instance, Archlinux, which is also a binary distribution, but compiled for the i686 architecture, as opposed to the two mentioned before which are compiled for i386, with the effect that Arch is faster, but won't run on older computers. Then there are also the source-based distributions, like Gentoo and LFS (which isn't really a distribution). Source-based means that most or all of applications on the system are installed from sources, which is a great performance booster. Binary distribution makers must compile the programs to cover all eventualities, while compiling from sources in a way means that the application will be custom-built for the environment of your machine. You can also include or exclude support for optional components, pass compiler flags to optimise the binary even more... But that's all not that important - SuSE is a fine distro (that's what I started out with), and the performance impact is not much of a problem (in fact, you said it seems faster than XP, so I guess you're pretty satisfied with it), so stick with it for a while until you're ready for more. You can, though, try out other environments and apps (which in my view is likely to gain you more performance than switching distros), for example try WindowMaker instead of KDE, Sylpheed instead of whatever you're using now, etc. For every task, there are mostly several apps, covering the range from bells&whistles to spartan and blazing fast, and you can pick the one that suits you best. Cheers -- Horror Vacui Registered Linux user #257714 Go get yourself... counted: http://counter.li.org/ - and keep following the GNU. To unsubscribe from this list, please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] & you will be removed. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
