Official Linux Thread

[alaricljs]

The practical behind Gentoo is that you can be very picky about what gets installed and what support is compiled into things.  So I have GTK but not Gnome, I have QT but not KDE, and if I don't use a particular program it's just not installed.  There's not going to be a perceivable performance difference.  A buddy of mine at work that used to use Gentoo on everything switched to Arch and is extremely happy with it.

[OrangeJewce]

The practical behind Gentoo is that you can be very picky about what gets installed and what support is compiled into things.  So I have GTK but not Gnome, I have QT but not KDE, and if I don't use a particular program it's just not installed.  There's not going to be a perceivable performance difference.  A buddy of mine at work that used to use Gentoo on everything switched to Arch and is extremely happy with it.

You can get something like 6% performance increases if you optimize your CFLAGs enough.

Cheers,

[alaricljs]

There's not going to be a perceivable performance difference.

You can get something like 6% performance increases if you optimize your CFLAGs enough.

And without benching you'll never notice so it doesn't really matter for a desktop.  If you're dealing with large data sets then maybe you'll notice.

[OrangeJewce]

There's not going to be a perceivable performance difference.

You can get something like 6% performance increases if you optimize your CFLAGs enough.

And without benching you'll never notice so it doesn't really matter for a desktop.  If you're dealing with large data sets then maybe you'll notice.

Never said it was worth it...only that the performance increase is there! ;-D

Cheers,

[rknize]

The increase you will observe depends on a great many things.  Your particular CPU variant, the version of GCC you are using, and of course the workload.

Back when x86 binaries were all compiled for i386, recompiling for your native "Pentium" class architecture made a measurable difference...even on the desktop.  For doing codec stuff on P4, compiling for P4 was pretty much mandatory.  Now all the IA32 stuff is generally compiled for i686.  IA64 doesn't seem to gain much when optimized for your variant in my experience.  I've pretty much given up on this sort of thing so I can't say much more than that.

[godly_music]

To give you some speed comparison from my Q9550..

Standard Aoyumi OGG Vorbis encoder gets ~85x speed.
SSE2 Lancer base Aoyumi OGG Vorbis encoder gets ~125x speed.

My standard ffdshow settings are 5-tap lowpass, deband, spline upsize, xsharpen.

Generic ffdshow build uses 25-35% CPU.
ICL10 optimized ffdshow build uses 15-25% CPU.

Yeah, it largely depends on the application. For all kinds of audio/video work, yes, highly recommended. For this specific case though, Arch is already i686 optimized, which should be good enough.

[Matt3o]

finally got some time and installed Arch Linux (64bit) with systemd right from the start. It took some time but it was well worth the effort. The system is slightly more responsive than my previous Fedora install but memory usage is definitely better.

[blert]

I have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a secondary boot on my desktop, and a really lightweight version of XFCE on my laptop... I've all but given up on the Ubuntu install. If you have anywhere near cutting edge PC components, half of the pieces don't work.  [...]

I might just be used to it (running Linux as primary at work since Ubuntu 6.04, and everywhere else since probably 10.04, with earlier work systems on various *nixes), but I haven't had a lot of issues with recent installs.  Most of my coworkers (small group) are running Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) without much problem (just a couple of set-up tweaks for one that I know of -- same for me), on newer Dell laptops.  I had a few issues with a Lenovo at my last gig, but I got things worked out (that laptop had a few issues with wireless in Win XP, too).   I do run multiple monitors, sometimes with a docking station, sometimes not.  This has required some configuration, but really not much more than Win7 does (with my dual-boot Dell). 
I also cheated a couple of years ago and bought a nice system76 laptop with Linux pre-installed for home.

  I move between lubuntu (Openbox-based) and fluxbox and unity these days.     I haven't tried a whole lot of DVD playing, though.  Last time, I got things to work -- seems like I had to set a region manually, and then I was good.  With ubuntu, do 'sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras' if you haven't (Also [klx]ubuntu-*, if you're on one of those.) 

I like 'buntu's Unity, with the exception of about two things -- global menu treatment and scrollbars.  I really like it otherwise, especially like its keyboard shortcuts.  (Protip -- hold down the 'super/win/tux' key for a bit in default unity for a pop-up shortcuts list).   For myself,  I have to install ccsm for tweaking the desktop environment.   I change the size of the launcher icons (in stock settings), etc, but I don't mind those terribly.    Of course, if I install terminator, nmap, htop, and minicom, I'm pretty good to go.  Kids play minecraft on one of the Linux boxes at home, so that requires pointing to the correct Java libraries, but smooth-sailing for the most part.

Nice thing with the Linux stuff is that you can change what you like, script things easily, and run conservatively or cutting edge.  I'm using Ubuntu now largely for the package management, updates, and community (askubuntu.com, etc.).   I think Ubuntu has done a good job of extending Debian's package management -- good stability, security, and not too far out of date.  The ppa's (personal package archives) also work really well (in my experience, and anecdotally with most who use them).

[blert]

I use Ubuntu, like many others, but at work we use CentOS on all of our servers so I spend most of my time working in a shell on that. While CentOS is slow to update, it's an extremely stable platform and it's nice to not often have issues come up regarding the OS itself. Install it and it just works with no fuss or muss.

For what it's worth, we run a mix of CentOS, some BSD's, Debian, and the Ubuntu server flavor at work.   So far, the CentOS and Ubuntu have been the easiest and most stable.  Well, the OpenBSD has also been very stable (as one would expect?), but updates have been a pain (due to changes impacting our existing configuration logic, etc.).   Debian has been stable, but again, upgrades have required more hand-holding.