[clue-tech] Taking the Gentoo Plunge?

[Ken MacFerrin]

katanacb at comcast.net wrote:
> Thanks for the info, from everyone who has answered so far, erspecially from the ones who have used Gentoo for years and continue to use it.   I was hoping not to start a distro flame war like you see on OSNews or Slashdot :).  Yesterday, I burned the 2007.0 release, got the base system installed / recompiled last night, and to be honest  X-windows compiled while I was getting ready for work this morning.  So, I don't think that the total compile time, if you put it end-to-end, is going to be as bad as I thought.
> 
> BTW I have an AMD64 3200, 2GB RAM, lots and lots of disk space (most of it RAID), and an NVIdia 7800 card.  LIke someone pointed out in a reply, I'd really hate to do this on something like a 500Mhz P3 or something, I can see the whole process taking days and days.
> 
> <asbestos suit on>
> 
> Part of why I'm looking at Gentoo is because I have a 64-bit system, and I'm just unhappy with 64-bit releases in general.  Yes I know, 64-bit is new to the desktop, and even windows didn't support it that well, but IMHO it's been around long enough that the issues I've run into over the last few years should have been solved by now, but they just aren't.  Specifically, I've run into 2 problems, no matter what the distro, and I'm hoping that gentoo will solve those issues for me.   (1).  Performance.   SuSE, Fedora, RHEL, (K)Ubuntu, you name it ... all of them perform MUCH slower on my 64-bit machine than their 32-bit counterparts.  Some of them take eons to do some things like open up konqueror, fire up firefox, or start openoffice.  My old Thinkpad T-30 was always MUCH faster doing any of this and easily beat the pants off my home system.  For the life of me, I don't know why it's like that.  I've tried to figure it out, googled till I have carpal tunnel, re-compiled kern
el
>  s and 
> tweeked hardware, and still things are slower


There was some recent conversation on Blug about this and someone made a
good point that you often won't see a speed improvement running 64-bit
unless you have specific needs that will take advantage of the extra
memory space.  Otherwise, you could actually see a decrease as the extra
address space is just additional useless bits that have to get pushed
across the bus.  The general consensus was that you're better off
running the 32-bit version of the OS for typical desktop use.

Also, if you are running 64 bit gentoo.. I'd highly recommend running
the binary 32-bit version of Firefox so you can avoid issues with flash
and codecs.

-Ken