Sluggish Mandrake WAS RE: [PLUG] Fedora change...

[Sasha Romanosky]

> 
> On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 13:24, Sasha Romanosky wrote:
> 
> > What is it exactly about Mandrake that makes you say its unstable, 
> > bulky and not geared towards a server setup
> 
> Unstable - everybody I've spoken to who has used Mandrake 
> within the last few years has noticed it has crashed a few 
> times on them.  Folks who switch from Mandrake to Slackware 
> (or Gentoo) I run in to elsewhere tend to rave about how 
> stable things are now that they're away from Mandrake.  That 
> said, I'm sure there are folks who have fun Mandrake without 
> having any signficant issues. 

Sure, no one likes a crashing server. But I would be one of these folks
who hasn't had any significant issues - or at least nothing I could
trace back to the OS

> A lot of Mandrake's 
> instability, I believe, is due to their super-patched kernel. 
>  Slackware, for one, uses as vanilla a kernel as possible.
> 
> Bulky - it's just so darned sluggish.  When last I installed 
> it, it installed, by default, a *ton* of startup services.  
> Yes, you can turn them off, but I like the policy of stuff 
> being off unless I turn it on, personally.  

Much of this is scripted depending on the security setting that you
define at the top of the install. Tweaking the post install, I would
argue, is part of any fresh installation - regardless of the distro.
Though, the less fussing, the sooner time to a live system.

> Another thing 
> folks who move away from Mandrake I've run in to tend to rave 
> about is the increased speed.  They can't believe how fast 
> their systems can boot and how snappy things (even bulky, 
> slow things like KDE) feel to them.

This would be something that would think about switching (that and
package mgmt). I am reluctant to ask, but are there any stats or metrics
on the performance gains of Gentoo, Debian, Fedora/Redhat over Mandrake?

> 
> The above two pretty much rule it out for a server setup.  
> You don't want to waste resources on a production server - it 
> just doesn't make sense.  Stability should be paramount, too. 
>  Ideally, you really shouldn't ever have to look at a server 
> again except to update this or that.

Fair enough. 

> That's just my opinion on it... I'm sure there are folks who 
> have found other distributions to be slower than Mandrake, 
> and who haven't had any stability problems with Mandrake at 
> all.  I'm definitely not one of them
> - I've had both stability and speed issues running Mandrake, 
> but don't have either with Slackware or Gentoo.  A system 
> that wouldn't run Mandrake for more than fifteen or twenty 
> minutes is currently my server, with 45 days uptime, with 
> three sets of 180 days each before this last reboot... all 
> reboots were due to power outages outlasting the UPS, 
> hardware upgrades, or... once... I did a root oops with hdparm.  :-)
> 
> Rob

I've been curious about Gentoo. I know nothing about it, aside from its
debian like package management. Do you know this well enough to
elaborate on its benefits?

cheers,
sasha