Arch Linux

zewsk

Member

Registered: 2009-02-01

Posts: 3

Usability vs. Speed, Customization & Efficiency

Greetings All,

I would like to open a philosophical discussion on the merits of usability vs. speed, customization & efficiency. I am a recent convert to Arch from and refugee from Ubuntu. I have learned a great deal from poking about under the hood of Arch, and can now chown, chmod, grep, and so on. I have gotten may hands dirty with fstab, rc.conf, and a half dozen other .confs, hand configured AMP, etc, and loving it. But here's how it went:

First I installed a base Arch system, bolted on Xfce4, and a few bits and pieces from Gnome. Wow, the boot was fast and Xfce loaded in under 3 seconds. Loving it. Then I went to do some real work. Well that required samba to get over to some windows shares, swiftfox, thunderbird, alsa tools, flash plugin, blah, blah, blah... by the time my system was usable, my boot time was up, and my xfce load time was around 10 seconds. Even a browser launch takes about 7 seconds

In other words, even though I spent weeks learning, customizing, tweaking, etc, arguably, I now have a system that's just about as usable as a vanilla ubuntu install. Sure I saved a few cents worth of disk space, and I learned a whole lot. But, in the end, I didn't really gain anything in terms of the speed and efficiency that I initially was so giddy about. I have had bragging rights over my mac and windows friends ever since I moved over to a linux/compiz desktop. Their jaws drop when I show them. But I wanted to silence the last mac fanboy with a blazingly fast boot, and it's just not there... I tried every trick in the book, noatime, changed journalling options on ext3, tried ext4, tweaked the crap out of my initialization and shutdown scripts, and got squat. Ok, not every trick, because I haven't compiled my own kernel yet, although that's, er, next weekend, I imagine.

So here it is, I'm throwing the meat on the table: unless you're setting up a single purpose environment, like an apache server, you can't really beat the system with Arch or any other distro. Once you configure (insert favourite distro name here) to do anything useful, you might as well have installed Ubuntu and saved yourself the trouble.

What say you my esteemed colleagues?

zewsk.

aaaantoine

Member

Registered: 2008-12-12

Posts: 44

Re: Usability vs. Speed, Customization & Efficiency

I think perhaps the claims that Arch is fast can only be made because of its lack of initial bloat.  If you add what you need and only what you need, there's a likely chance your system will run faster than a default Ubuntu installation.  If you add every package that Ubuntu uses out of the box, the speed will be similar.

pogeymanz

Member

Registered: 2008-03-11

Posts: 1,020

Re: Usability vs. Speed, Customization & Efficiency

That's probably true, but 32-bit Arch is compiled for i686, while Ubuntu is for i386. This could make a difference on older hardware.

So in the end, the difference is negligible if you are just going to install the exact same stuff.

Try this to convince your mac friend: Install preload and readahead (http://quasiyodel.wordpress.com/2008/12 … archlinux/) remove your graphical login manager and autologin your user. Those will surely take a few seconds off of boot time. I assume you're also backgrounding most/all of your daemons in rc.conf? You can also manual load modules in mkinitcpio.conf instead of autoloading them in rc.conf. That makes stuff move quicker too.

In these ways, Arch is much easier to tweak than Ubuntu, which is why I like it. It's very transparent.

Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: Usability vs. Speed, Customization & Efficiency

This thread will be moved to the section "Going nowhere"...but I'll play along.

How about getting rid of the bloated DEs and using a nice WM. Openbox is sure fast as hell. But then you will not be able to use Compiz...its always a trade off. You wanna use heavy graphics...you better expect a slight delay --because after all its loading up many processes in the background.

Last edited by Inxsible (2009-02-17 18:51:56)

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scj

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2007-09-23

Posts: 158

Re: Usability vs. Speed, Customization & Efficiency

Since when was speed and efficiency measured in boot time?

1LordAnubis

Member

Registered: 2008-10-10

Posts: 253

Website

Re: Usability vs. Speed, Customization & Efficiency

Arch is slightly faster than ubuntu in my experience, anyway. But the reason I use arch instead of something more "user friendly" is that Arch is "what you want it to be." When you install ubuntu, you get "ubuntu," *not* what *you* want it to be. Also, tweaking arch is easier from my point of view... ubuntu hides everything from the user and can make things more complicated. Also, with something like ubuntu, you have to reinstall your OS every 6 months. With arch or another system on a rolling release you never need to reinstall it to upgrade, and upgrades generally go pretty smoothly.
I would personally rather install what I want rather than get something thats preconfigured, and have to go back trying to change it to the way I want it

That being said... if you don't want to know how your system works in detail, just use something like ubuntu. If you do, or if you already know how it works, you might as well use Arch for the speed and simplicity and for the fact that its what you make it. (this makes it a lot simpler from my point of view; ubuntu's user friendliness has often caused a lot of trouble for my friends and I. Who likes it when you have to reinstall because ubuntu did something with your graphics driver and you have no idea what its doing, along with spending all the time reinstalling your system every 6 months)

I wouldn't use arch for a server... use debian with its architecture support and security updates. If you have home computer I would use Arch, or Ubuntu if you don't want to mess with your computer. If you have a business computer, it would be simple to put fedora on it; as easy to set up as ubuntu, has a lot of cool patches and easy to set up security.
If you don't think arch is enough of a speed boost, install gentoo for a little more of a speed boost, but remember its probably going to take a lot of time to compile your system..

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cerbie

Member

Registered: 2008-03-16

Posts: 124

Re: Usability vs. Speed, Customization & Efficiency

Greetings All,

I would like to open a philosophical discussion on the merits of usability vs. speed, customization & efficiency. I am a recent convert to Arch from and refugee from Ubuntu. I have learned a great deal from poking about under the hood of Arch, and can now chown, chmod, grep, and so on. I have gotten may hands dirty with fstab, rc.conf, and a half dozen other .confs, hand configured AMP, etc, and loving it. But here's how it went:

First I installed a base Arch system, bolted on Xfce4, and a few bits and pieces from Gnome. Wow, the boot was fast and Xfce loaded in under 3 seconds.

How do you do that? XFCE takes almost as long as KDE for me. What's the deal? Anyway...

Loving it. Then I went to do some real work. Well that required samba to get over to some windows shares, swiftfox, thunderbird, alsa tools, flash plugin, blah, blah, blah... by the time my system was usable, my boot time was up, and my xfce load time was around 10 seconds. Even a browser launch takes about 7 seconds

Now that's odd. I get nervous every single time I start FF in Ubuntu, because on my Arch, FF (the plain firefox package for x86_64) starts within a second.

In other words, even though I spent weeks learning, customizing, tweaking, etc, arguably, I now have a system that's just about as usable as a vanilla ubuntu install.

I'm not finding mine that way. However, since I need it up for making-money kind of work, I'm stuck with it for a few more days. It's slow, does a bunch of random HDD activity, and a few handy apps aren't working as well. Ubuntu has a GUI for you quicker, and that's about it.

Sure I saved a few cents worth of disk space, and I learned a whole lot. But, in the end, I didn't really gain anything in terms of the speed and efficiency that I initially was so giddy about. I have had bragging rights over my mac and windows friends ever since I moved over to a linux/compiz desktop. Their jaws drop when I show them. But I wanted to silence the last mac fanboy with a blazingly fast boot, and it's just not there... I tried every trick in the book, noatime, changed journalling options on ext3, tried ext4, tweaked the crap out of my initialization and shutdown scripts, and got squat. Ok, not every trick, because I haven't compiled my own kernel yet, although that's, er, next weekend, I imagine.

That's the very first trick in the book. Compiling your own kernel, and trimming out the excess in your init scripts is all that will make a major difference in boot time. If you care about that, do it. Trim hardware support in your kernel (do you need PS3 vibrator support? iSCSI? 10GbE?), make it where it has enough compiled in to not need an initrd/initramfs image, and then start taking unneeded bloat from scripts (remember, the kernel and many service scripts are designed for many hardware and software environments, of which yours is only one of). My mobo takes about 20 seconds just to get to GRUB, so I don't mess with it, these days (S3 instead of powering off, whenever I can manage). Also, doing your own kernel only looks hard. You select what you want from menus, do a couple more make commands after that, wait a few minutes, edit menu.lst, then reboot.

So here it is, I'm throwing the meat on the table: unless you're setting up a single purpose environment, like an apache server, you can't really beat the system with Arch or any other distro. Once you configure (insert favourite distro name here) to do anything useful, you might as well have installed Ubuntu and saved yourself the trouble.

What say you my esteemed colleagues?

zewsk.

Ubuntu is big, slow, and pretty. Arch is small, fast (lacking in services and such I don't need or want out of the box), and a bit prickly. It's a shame, too, because there are other distros do the basics right, like SimplyMEPIS (recovering from the Ubuntu sources quite well), but they get lost under the blanketing fog of Ubuntu hype.

<_< Why is this in DE?

Last edited by cerbie (2009-02-17 22:30:29)

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toxygen

Member

Registered: 2008-08-22

Posts: 713

Re: Usability vs. Speed, Customization & Efficiency

I basically installed arch, kdemod (whatever the main package is), and a few other apps i needed/wanted, then started optimizing from there, removing unnecesary packages and their deps, tweaking the ones i kept, and overall my experience (compared to kubuntu) has been faster, snappier with arch.  it's all about tweaking and removing the junk though...

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