Ubuntu v Arch, Ubuntu faster?

Okay so I have been reading a lot of arch v Ubuntu lately with me thinking of switching to Ubuntu. Why you crazy person you may ask, well I am going to tweak it and break it, learn things and repeat, I find arch harder to break than Ubuntu lol, bleeding edge harder to break Lil anyways.

I was reading Phoronix and stumbled across this article with manjaro v Ubuntu and Ubuntu was beating it in most tests, although the situations could be majorly different its still beating.

Take a look

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM1ODQ

So is this to believe? I mean overall Ubuntu is heavier than manjaro in their default configurations 

Also ideas for tweaks etc to Ubuntu? I want to see how much it can actually take overall I will report findings :)

Laters!

I can't comment about speed, I feel it's relative to what you are using really but I always felt ubuntu a bit slower than my Arch, though it could be placebo..

If you want to learn and you want to break and repair things go with Gentoo

I find gentoo harder to break I can break Ubuntu before its installed lol

1 Like

I'm just waiting for Zoltan to posit his opinions on this.

You just have to know how to read phoronix: Michael Larabel is actually a linux hater and a strange diva with a knack for rancune and drama. It's a bit of a joke in the linux world. He's a nutcase, but subtract his editorial and neurotic comments from his site, and phoronix is a decent news aggregation page.

He recently admitted that he had been running linux in a VM in OSX on his Apple retina macbook pro, and that now that he has received another laptop, and has installed linux on bare metal, he wishes he had stayed with OSX. He just runs a linux site for the money, so don't read his articles, click on the links in his articles and go right to the source.

Now to the speed thingy: speed is relative.

Ubuntu Core is not slow, it's just not that fast either. There is a difference between "slow and fast" and "minimal and full featured". Ubuntu is slow, it's also a mess, Xubuntu is fast, it's also decent mainstream quality, both are based on exactly the same Ubuntu Core, which is pretty decent.

Some distros are remarkably fast for being so full-featured. Ubuntu core is pretty minimal by design, but only about as fast as a full blown RPM-distro, which has a lot more features, and as far as file system support for instance goes, the bleeding edge distros just have matured more, and the file system performance is quite a lot better, like sometimes almost 2 times better even.

The regular user that can see (not measure) the difference in speed in daily use between Xubuntu 14.04TC and Manjaro for instance, when both are configured with the same packages, must have an incredible sense of timing, because I can't see it. I see the difference in file system performance when I rsync an overlay file from SSD to HDD, arch does that a lot better, but the idea of rsyncing that overlay file is that you don't have to watch it, so ...

If you say that a distro is fast and another is slow, you have to know why you're saying that, and most people that talk about how fast their distro is, don't know why:

- Bleeding edge distros are usually faster, because a more modern kernel base, usually means better optimizations. Sometimes there can be performance regressions though, or the optimizations can maybe only affect certain hardware. For instance, the 3.13 kernel first showed some performance regressions because of the added features that haven't fully matured yet, but on AMD and Intel graphics systems, there is a considerable performance increase because of those functions, so someone running an nVidia graphics system might think a kernel 3.13 based distro is slower, whereas AMD and Intel graphics users might love the speed of the same kernel 3.13 based distro. The benefit of running bleeding edge, is not only the newer features, but also, bleeding edge distros gather experience faster with newer kernels and technologies, so they iron out regressions faster. A good example on how this impacts performance is the file system performance. Bleeding edge distros like Fedora, Arch or Gentoo have much higher file system performance than for instance Ubuntu Core. This is a considerable difference, although - as aforementioned - not always very visible to a regular user.

- Some distros just have a lot more features by default than others. RPM-distros have SELinux on by default. Yet they're not slower than for instance Ubuntu Core or Debian, that don't have this huge system implemented. Bleeding edge distros, because they're bleeding edge and need stability monitoring of the latest kernels, use daemons to monitor the kernel, so that in case of a bug, better data is available for diagnostics, this also costs performance, but they're optimized enough not to really feel the impact of that monitoring.

- A user can turn off features of a distro to enhance performance. Usually, this is only useful in particular use case scenarios. An example is the watchdog daemon, which is something most distros use. It's a hardware timer that writes settings every ten seconds by default to help a user reboot a system in it's current state if a critical event would happen. Most users could do without and not even ever notice it, and it does take a very tiny bit of system resources every ten seconds.

- The main reason why some distros are faster than others, has nothing to do with the distro itself, it has everything to do with the added software that is delivered by default, like the DE (still the biggest source of performance differentiation), the graphics drivers, proprietary software like flash, etc...

2 Likes

Okay so by your comments OpenSUSE is as fast as arch base, and xubuntu is just the same.

But I personally am in a bit of a distro pugotary I can't decide on opensuse poss lxde or minimal or Ubuntu minimal lxde I am unsure yet ideas people? The setup is for gaming and a bit of VM and programming 

Regarding phoronix, if I may.

I too have noticed how skewed his views are (not only regarding linux), but I use his site for benchmarks. I haven't found another site with linux benchmarks, and he benchmarks very often, you have to give him credit for that.

Do you know of a site with reliable linux benchmarks? If not, do you think that the benchmarks he runs are biased enough that they are unreliable and not fit to be used for comparisons between hardware and software versions?

 

Who said you have to choose? Just relax and use what you want, when you want.

You don't have to use just one thing. I have both KDE and XFCE on my main systems, because I like both. Before that I used Gnome a lot also. It's not like Windows, you're absolutely permitted to use whatever you please.

The same goes for distros. A distro is just a distro, the base system that enables your applications. I typically use RPM-distros (right now Mageia) because of the enterprise factor. For just-for-fun standalone machines, I typically use Arch and Gentoo because they're lighter. I use Manjaro and Sabayon myself because it's just convenient, it saves time. I don't want to worry about software, there are more important things to worry about.

Benefit of linux is that you can do whatever you want without losing time when changing your mind.

You just save your Steam games with the backup function provided in Steam, and you can run Steam in a VLC or VM, and snapshot it. You can rsync your home folder to your NAS, you can install other distros without formatting your home partition, etc... installing a distro is a matter of 2-3 minutes for binary distros. You can change your mind as much as you want. I use several distros simultaneously all the time, because I'm curious, but I don't want to spend my life trying out distros and reinstalling stuff. The functionality is there, you just have to use it.

If you have hardware paravitualization down, you can install everything in kvm containers. That's something that I also do a lot, just only run kvm containers on a Mageia or Arch or Gentoo system.

Part of the "knowing linux" thing is to be familiar with different distros and their package managers. Because that's basically it, you pick a distro based on two things: the package manager and the release model. The rest is much less important.

For gaming, it's always nice to have bleeding edge, because there is graphics performance benefit to be had in the latest kernels. Also gamers often use up-to-date hardware, that just works better with bleeding edge distros. In my opinion, there is little use in running a two year old kernel and having to patch the life out of it to make a new graphics card or wifi adapter work. The benefit of Arch/Manjaro is that you have the AUR, which has all the games in their latest versions. Gentoo is also pretty good for gaming, but other distros are often not up-to-date with open source games.

Another thing is support. Some distros are owned by corporations, and they make commercial deals, and that sometimes leads to unwanted results, for instance Fedora orphaning the well compiling Catalyst drivers, while at the same time offering the never compiling piece of shit nvidia proprietary drivers. So I switched to Mageia, same thing without the corporate corruption... and it's not "almost the same thing", it literally is the same thing, RPM-distros share maintainers and developers, they just have a different release and repo policy. It makes no difference at all if you run OpenSuSE or Fedora or Mageia, except if you want to use the Catalyst driver for instance, or want to use Firefox ESR with a stable flash plugin, or want to use Gnome without the RedHat spyware, or want to run Xen with a Windows container for some reason, etc... you just take what suits you best for a specific purpose.

I really like Manjaro myself. It offers a well-supported set of software that I would probably install anyway if I were to just use Arch. For the purpose that I use it for, Manjaro suits me just fine. Same for Gentoo if you like a very heavily configured machine that still runs nice and smooth. If Manjaro includes some software that I don't like, like with their 0.8.8 version time frame, that was a bit of a less strong period of time, I just switch to Arch.

tip: you write the package names of all the applications that you always use, and type them in a single line in a text file that you save. Then for instance when you install Arch or Manjaro or whatever Arch based, you just cat that file into a pacman -S command, and all of your software will be installed at once in a few minutes. You can recycle such a file for years.

It's not about what distro you use, it's about what you do with it.

3 Likes

AKA, "Use the right tool for the job at hand." This sums up the whole distro/OS debate.

1 Like

The fact that Ubuntu can be faster is may not be by random chance, but because the optimize the packages, with compiler flags when they build them and occasionally even modify the code specifically for Ubuntu.

In contrast with that, on Arch most thing are build with the default settings, since they move so fast from version to version that there is no time to thoroughly test each version for best performance

1 Like

This reply required more than a Like.. here you go
+1
+1
+1
couldnt agree more completely

Did anyone look at the actual original results? The results are far closer together than the article you linked to suggests http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1304239-UT-1304238UT67

So close in fact i say it goes to suggest that theres no point basing your choice on performance.

You can make every distro run at the same speed...
USE THE MINIMAL DISTRO IMAGES haha...
trollllololol

In all seriousness.. those speed differences are so negligible

I switched from Manjaro because it was too stable running the latest kernels and unstable repositories, but now I'm having the same problems with Funtoo, it's too stable, and I'm bored.

Sounds like you need to enable testing repositories in Pacman and change your Portage profile trees with some more experimental keywords.

Unstable repositories are more "unstable" than testing.

If you feel bored on the unstable repo's of Arch, Gen/Fun-too, no distro will fix your problem, you are just bored of the rate at which developers release software...

I've run unstable and testing on Gentoo and Arch respectively and never had a problem except the occasional GCC fart.

If you want to speed up Ubuntu you can install it to a 'BTRFS' partition instead of ext4. Remember to have a 512MB /boot partition though.

Make sure your running LTS (12.04 or 14.04) and not the in between versions for stability.

I was talking about Manjaro, not Ubuntu.