A week ago I bought my first Multi-Core computer. So I got into the question: “What operating system do I want to install?“. I bought it without pre-installed Windows, which is getting harder and harder.
O.K. to be more honest, I already knew it will be Linux so let put the question right: “What distribution do I want to install?“. I wanted to squeeze as much power as possible, or in other words to be able to have as much computation power available for me and applications I want to use and not wasted on the operating system itself. Based on discussions with my dear colleague Jan Pradac, who is somekind of a Linux-Guru in the company I am currently working, I decided to go with his favorite Gentoo.
Don’t worry all the jokes about Gentoo users who compile their OS for weeks reached me already so I was expecting to play with it and I took my time. Surprise was that with 4 cores and 4GB of RAM it took me only a day! LiveCD -> Kernel -> System -> KDE -> Lot of playing around. After a weekend I had a fully operational system with all the settings from my previous computer. Don’t understand me wrong: weekend is not that much. Installation itself was just couple hours the rest was playing around 🙂
After a while I was curious if there is a speed, latency difference using this distro… so I installed Debian and Ubuntu. Installation was done in cca 30minutes which is less compared to cca 3 hours for Gentoo. Also the installation in Gentoo needs much more interaction and experience. No GUI installer. But as soon as I started the system and everything was set up I felt the difference. Booting time in Gentoo is like 10-15 seconds compared to 5-10 minutes in the other two distributions. You can feel the system reacting much faster… someone would say immediately 😀
Looking forward to play with my new system!