Performance of Gentoo compared to Ubuntu [closed]

Question

A lot of people say that Gentoo is much faster than a distribution like Ubuntu. Is the performance of Gentoo really so impressive? Is Gentoo recommendable as a desktop system?

Answer 1

Having used both Gentoo and Ubuntu as desktop systems for multiple years each, I would say Gentoo's performance advantage is not at all noticeable. I imagine there might be some noticeable difference if you spend a lot of time using some CPU-intensive application. However, when it comes to average day-to-day usage, there's really no difference.

Unless you're talking about how much time you'll spend wrestling with your system, in which case Ubuntu wins hands down! Not only does basic installation of programs (not to mention the system itself) take exponentially longer in Gentoo, but getting things configured "just so" (which you'll quite often have to do in Gentoo) can be a tedious mess.

I would liken the difference between Gentoo and Ubuntu (and pretty much any other pre-compiled distro) somewhat to the difference between C++ and C# (or pretty much any other garbage-collected C-style language). In Gentoo, you have to manage a lot of the garbage that Ubuntu manages for you. But you might get slightly better performance under certain circumstances. It's a trade-off between special-case performance and overall productivity, efficiency, what have you.

Now don't get me wrong. I absolutely love Gentoo. I'm currently using it as my desktop OS at work. If you really want to get your hands dirty with Linux, it's a great way to go.

Done rambling now...

Answer 2

Polish Linux has a side-by-side comparison for Linux-based systems, including Ubuntu vs Gentoo, although it focuses more on the general aspects of each distro, rather than the outright performance.

Linux Magazine has an article with a series of benchmark comparisons between the three most common GCC optimizations for Gentoo and Ubuntu "for good measure".

Conclusion

These tests show that when it comes to optimizing with GCC, there is not a huge amount of difference between them. If there had to be a winner, it would probably be -O2. It was often on par with -O3 while sometimes leading and sometimes trailing by a small margin. The fact that -O2 will also result in lower memory usage probably helps to tip the scales in its favour.

Generally speaking, the -Os level did worse than the others, which were much more evenly matched. It is still the choice for low end systems as it uses less memory and still performs quite well. It did however, even manage to take out several tests in its own right.

Although we are not comparing apples to apples, Gentoo did out-perform Ubuntu in almost every test, and sometimes by a fair margin. It does appear that optimizing for a specific CPU can yield a decent performance increase.

Of course, Gentoo offers benefits in other areas with their USE flags and being able to build a highly customized system. The question is whether the amount of time it takes is worth the benefit, and that’s a personal choice

Answer 3

Basic points:

a) Flexibility(Gentoo) vs easiness(Ubuntu)

b) Customization(Gentoo) vs Rigid structure(Ubuntu)

c) Power of knowledge vs dumbness;like many other binary distro(Ubuntu)

d) Not for everybody(sorry geeks only) vs anybody(window user love to migrate through this)

e) One has to have the understanding of lot many GNU/Linux internal to work with Gentoo...because it demands it :) ; but on the other hand one can cake walk Ubuntu..because the underlying details are masked :(

f)Choice of absolute necessary(Gentoo) vs friendliness(Ubuntu)

g) Rolling release..not to break system (Gentoo) vs Need to upgrade to next release..might break

and many more .....

Answer 4

Lots of the performance gain is not by directly the optimization itself, but the dependencies. lddin an average executable in Ubuntu yields a lot of lines, libraries to load. In Gentoo I'm not particularly trying to keep the system lean but a few selected USE flags can make a difference. Loading apps from the HD takes time, critical time, if the application otherwise eats little resources.

This USE aspect is a direct consequence of gentoo's fine customizability.