Which linux distro will roughly match desktop performance of xp

whitecrook · 17 Nov 2007 at 17:33

So bledd which distros have you found to be pretty fast?

What did you think of the distros suggested?

bledd · 17 Nov 2007 at 17:48

i've been hungover all week, so not bothered yet!

SiriusB · 17 Nov 2007 at 20:30

Smeg4Brains said:
Not on my quad core it wasnt.

It was certainly faster than the last release, but still nowhere near on par with XP.

You really need gentoo if you want a fast distro, gentoo+kde4 = the shiznit

Runs like stink on my quad.

GarethDW · 17 Nov 2007 at 21:07

Give Sabayon a whirl... it's Gentoo-based so it flies along nicely but you don't have to jump through hoops to get it installed unlike the original Gentoo.

Bes · 17 Nov 2007 at 21:29

Sabayon comes with a crapload of stuff you don't need.

Try Arch- Not as hardcore as Gentoo (thus far easier to install), far lighter than Sabayon, and faster than a greased cheetah on my E6600, and was even surprisingly fast on my old XP1900+.. Faster than XP? Absolutely no doubt about it.

Arch for the win my friend.. Arch for the win...

refresh · 18 Nov 2007 at 01:19

Never used Arch (must have a play), use Gentoo if you can be bothered to tinker with it and get it running fast! Zenwalk is a little nippy sod that ran nicely on a 600MHz laptop with no sluggishness and has all that you need included.

Mobius 1 · 18 Nov 2007 at 11:17

i only find the boot speed to be slow on my installation, is there anyway to speed this up?

refresh · 18 Nov 2007 at 16:49

Look at the boot and see which parts are slow, if they are non-critical for the boot (classic example being networking) then background them (put an & at the end of the offending line in whichever config file you are using.)

GarethDW · 19 Nov 2007 at 00:37

There's an app that you can run which shows a graphical representation of your PC booting, so you can see how long each part took to load and you can see what is the slowest.

Can't for the life of me remember what it's called though..... will try to remember when I'm less tired.

edit: it's called Bootchart - http://www.bootchart.org/index.html

fumbles · 20 Nov 2007 at 03:42

Arch rocks my socks!
Although if you are really hardcore...LFS, Linux from scratch.

tres · 20 Nov 2007 at 09:00

latest ubuntu with compiz works faster than xp on my machine

thelonecrouton · 20 Nov 2007 at 16:23

Puppy Linux.

Blows everything else away in speed/snappiness. Recently switched to it from Gutsy for my main surf/noodle around OS.

Everything gets loaded into RAM at boot (about 10 secs on my Opty 144/2GB cheapo RAM/7800GT) - apps open instantly. Actually instantly. It's the way an OS should be.

Hell it boots faster off the live cd than any other OS installed to HD.

edit: http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1

It's only about 100Megs - give it a go.

Cake · 21 Nov 2007 at 10:51

If it's sluggish, I'm guessing you're not doing something right. Most likely X11 hasn't been configured correctly to work with graphics drivers.

InSanCen · 23 Nov 2007 at 20:12

BackTrack2 with KDE is faster than XP on my celly 1.4 Lappy, 512MB.

BackTrack2 with Fluxbox is way faster.

And yeah, my XP is slightly tweaked (N-Lite).