Hello! I’m looking for a easy and stable Linux distro. I heard that the OpenSUSE is slower than MDV, Ubuntu, so is it a true?
OpenSUSE is very fast as far as I am concerned. Like most Operating Systems, it is dependent on both the speed of your PC including Video, Hard Drive, CPU and motherboard chipset including the quality and speed of the hardware driver support in Linux. Right now I am using openSUSE 11.3 RC2 on a Gigabyte motherboard with a Intel P35 chipset and Q9450 Quad core CPU running at 2.66 mhz. I have an nVidia 9800 GTX video card with a three hard drives (3 TB total space) and 8 GB of DDR2 memory. There are even faster PC’s such as those based on the Intel i7 CPU’s, yet my test PC is very fast in every way. In fact, I would wager that with a few exceptions due to lack of hardware support in Linux, any PC running Linux will be faster in every way than when running the latest Windows 7, depending on how you do your testing. openSUSE is fast, you can bet on it.
Thank You,
adam 993pl wrote:
> Hello! I’m looking for a easy and stable Linux distro. I heard that the
> OpenSUSE is slower than MDV, Ubuntu, so is it a true?
of course not!
stable? yes
fast? yes
-but, what is MDV?
-when comparing ‘speed’ with Ubuntu what speed are you measuring?
network throughput, words-per-minute you are allowed to type, speed of
light, shutdown speed, moving bits from first hard drive to the
second, what?
easy?
-please define easy
-if you expect to be able to install and use openSUSE without every
finding something that doesn’t work exactly like Win98, or the Cray at
your university, or Ubuntu…then, you probably should keep looking…
-if you expect to be able to smoothly use openSUSE while never
glancing at any documentation whatsoever–good luck.
but, why not just download and burn a KDE Live CD and see how you like
it…here is the latest version of the next version which will be
released in a few days…DO NOT INSTALL IT, just run it from the CD,
it will run faster once it has been released and then installed on
your machine [opensuse 11.3 RC2]:
http://software.opensuse.org/developer/en
the current version is here: http://software.opensuse.org/112/en
both have a Live KDE CD…
–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
via NNTP w/TBird 2.0.0.23 | KDE 3.5.7 | openSUSE 10.3
2.6.22.19-0.4-default SMP i686
AMD Athlon 1 GB RAM | GeForce FX 5500 | ASRock K8Upgrade-760GX |
CMedia 9761 AC’97 Audio
MDV - Mandriva
Speed - mean booting, operations on filesystem… typical desktop issues
Now I’m using Mepis 8.0, but the booting is very slow.
I used openSUSE 11.1 and I was happy.
My PC:
AMD Ahtlon 1.6Ghz (amd64)
1GB RAM
Radeon 9250
two disks 160GB (36GB for Linux)
Always I use GNOME Desktop (for me, KDE is slow and uncomfortable). I’ve openSUSE 11.2 DVD, so should I wait for OpenSUSE 11.3?
On 07/05/2010 09:16 AM, jdmcdaniel3 wrote:
>
> OpenSUSE is very fast as far as I am concerned. Like most Operating
> Systems, it is dependent on both the speed of your PC including Video,
> Hard Drive, CPU and motherboard chipset including the quality and speed
> of the hardware driver support in Linux. Right now I am using openSUSE
> 11.3 RC2 on a Gigabyte motherboard with a Intel P35 chipset and Q9450
> Quad core CPU running at 2.66 mhz. I have an nVidia 9800 GTX video card
> with a three hard drives (3 TB total space) and 8 GB of DDR2 memory.
> There are even faster PC’s such as those based on the Intel i7 CPU’s,
> yet my test PC is very fast in every way. In fact, I would wager that
> with a few exceptions due to lack of hardware support in Linux, any PC
> running Linux will be faster in every way than when running the latest
> Windows 7, depending on how you do your testing. openSUSE is fast, you
When looking at benchmarks that compare disk speed, be aware that the
default options used in mounting the file system may be different in some
distros. In every case, openSUSE will select the option that PRESERVES
DATA. The distro with the highest performance may have chosen the speedy
alternative. If you want speed and do not care that corruption might
occur, you can choose those options for yourself.
Essentially, I’m with lwfinger on this; I do not believe that there are noticeable speed differences between distros when set up in the same way (and I’ve looked at a fair amount of benchmarking to get to this opinion).
There are a number of caveats:
- different distros have different defaults; there certainly are differences in speed between different filesystem types (ext2/ext3/ext4/reiserfs/jfs/xfs/btrfs and friends) and different distros have different defaults for those, but if you compare like with like, those differences go away (that’s not to say that I can tell which is the fastest -or best- for your use case, if there is one, of course)
- You also have to equalise the other settings which influence speed (atime, journalling mode)
- Startup time can be heavily influenced by how much work the distro has put into optimising the execution of start up tasks. with the help of, eg, bootchart, you can do the same yourself and, in optimising on the target hardware, you can probably do it better (if that is of interest)
- At times there are regressions; whether a distro does or does not have a ‘regressed’ version of something is a function of luck/release timing and will happen ‘sort-of’ randomly to all distros at times. That said, there is a better chance of a distro which gets extended testing (eg, an enterprise distro or one which has a very conservative policy) having the chance to change to an ‘un-regressed’ version of whichever utility has the problem before release. I’m not counting regressions in this as they are vaguely random in whether they affect some particular release.
- You have to be comparing like with like in the sense of comparing versions running the same GUIs and the same set of daemons.
There is the objection to what I have just written that you don’t want to change all sorts of underlying things that the distro does just to have the same speed as something else. While I certainly think that is a reasonable position to take, you have to then ask what is being compared. Is it what the distro is capable of, or is it just what you get because you don’t want to be bothered with any of the techie stuff?
markone wrote:
> There are a number of caveats:
nice informative posting! thanks!!
–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
via NNTP w/TBird 2.0.0.23 | KDE 3.5.7 | openSUSE 10.3
2.6.22.19-0.4-default SMP i686
AMD Athlon 1 GB RAM | GeForce FX 5500 | ASRock K8Upgrade-760GX |
CMedia 9761 AC’97 Audio
This is an educational thread, and those posting on this thread know more about this than I.
Still, I have some views which I believe are not too inaccurate, and have not yet been stated in a lot of detail …
My view has always been that if speed was a major criteria for me in Linux, then I would NOT use any of the major releases. ie I would NOT use Ubuntu, nor Mandriva, nor Fedora, nor debian, nor Gentoo, nor openSUSE, nor any of the derivatives of any of the Linux distributions. For example Puppy Linux or D**n Small Linux come to mind as very light weight Linux versions that will run fast, but won’t have the same glitz and polish as the larger distributions.
Recently I’ve been testing and helping out in the openSUSE-11.3 preparation of the light weight LXDE desktop for openSUSE. It is noticeably faster than KDE and Gnome in PCs with 128M to 512M of RAM. But its still no competitor in speed to Puppy Linux or D**n Small Linux.
Just how important is speed ?
On Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:36:03 +0000, adam 993pl wrote for a reply:
> MDV - Mandriva
> Speed - mean booting, operations on filesystem… typical desktop issues
> Now I’m using Mepis 8.0, but the booting is very slow. I used openSUSE
> 11.1 and I was happy. My PC:
> AMD Ahtlon 1.6Ghz (amd64)
> 1GB RAM
> Radeon 9250
> two disks 160GB (36GB for Linux)
> Always I use GNOME Desktop (for me, KDE is slow and uncomfortable). I’ve
> openSUSE 11.2 DVD, so should I wait for OpenSUSE 11.3?
Yikes that’s a slow system.
These newer OS versions are going to eat up your memory and cpu very
quickly. Even your 1.6Ghz (AMD64) the speed would be much improved with
more memory. Don’t know you budget but I’d look to upgrade the memory or
m/b, cpu and memory if you want speed.
Right now memory is expensive. I’ve seen m/b and cpu combinations for
$60 USD faster than your cpu but 2Gb (2Gb x 1) DDR, DDR2 start at $35 USD
and go up. Same for 2Gb (1Gb x 2) kits, that I don’t recommend if you
want to move up to 4Gb of memory.
From what I have experienced while using different, ‘big’ distros (Ubuntu, Mint, Suse) is that with all of them, their speeds have been pretty fast on my machine which is about 4 years old. Much better than what I have experienced in any version of Windows. Once i stumbled upon an openSUSE 11.0/11.1 review online which said it was kind of slow with even 700 MB RAM (that’s not very much in today’s world but it’s good enough for any Linux distro, so there must have been other problems). When i tried Suse with 512 MB, it was really blazingly fast in every way.
And then again, the speed depends on the software you use. For example, a default oSuse install (using KDE) would be slower than a default Ubuntu install (which uses Gnome as the default). But in general, no, openSuse is NOT slower than any of the other mainstream distributions.
My experience with Linux distributions over the past year has been setting up a number of computers which dual boot; I’ve tried Ubuntu 9.x, 10.x, Mint (LDE), puppy linux, OpenSuse 11.3. I’ve installed them on older desktops (at the minimum specs for windows 7), old laptops which barely run windows 2K, and newer laptops with lots of ram and intel i3. In every single case, what ever windows version was running along side Linux, the windows system performed faster in all aspects including video, network communication, boot up speed, etc. Every comparable application has run faster under windows than linux, especially when the graphics controller is heavily used as with Google Earth. Wireless set up has been a major issue with every distribution but puppy linux which has other limitations of course. Side by side, on an older desktop modestly souped (p4, 2.6 GHz, 2 Gig ram, 128 M video card), OpenSuse 11.3 performed more quickly than Ubuntu 10.x and notable slower than Windows XP. As mentioned above, the limitation’s in speed may well be the hardware drivers available for Linux but that still is a part of the over-all computing experience. Even so, all the Linux distributions I’ve tried have been fast enough for what every I had to do. There are plenty of software solutions for most any task you need to accomplish and tech support is available, if not cumbersome, through blogs and forums.
With all that said, I prefer OpenSuse, which is a well developed stable, and functional operating system with lots of features I use it most of the time now except for writing where I depend on a completely functional citation manager (end note) and watching Netflix which continues to stubbornly resist supporting Linux.
The only time that I found openSuSE to be slow, was when I was running 10.1 on a system with 256M of memory. After booting, it seemed slow for a while. That was because of the checking of installed software to see if there were updates. The updating process was a pig, using 100M of memory.
They fixed that (I think in 10.3). Updating is much faster and uses less resources. In the meantime, I now have a faster machine with more memory. It seems fine to me.
My experience with Linux distributions over the past year has been setting up a number of computers which dual boot; I’ve tried Ubuntu 9.x, 10.x, Mint (LDE), puppy linux, OpenSuse 11.3. I’ve installed them on older desktops (at the minimum specs for windows 7), old laptops which barely run windows 2K, and newer laptops with lots of ram and intel i3. In every single case, what ever windows version was running along side Linux, the windows system performed faster in all aspects including video, network communication, boot up speed, etc. Every comparable application has run faster under windows than linux, especially when the graphics controller is heavily used as with Google Earth. Wireless set up has been a major issue with every distribution but puppy linux which has other limitations of course. Side by side, on an older desktop modestly souped (p4, 2.6 GHz, 2 Gig ram, 128 M video card), OpenSuse 11.3 performed more quickly than Ubuntu 10.x and notable slower than Windows XP. As mentioned above, the limitation’s in speed may well be the hardware drivers available for Linux but that still is a part of the over-all computing experience. Even so, all the Linux distributions I’ve tried have been fast enough for what every I had to do. There are plenty of software solutions for most any task you need to accomplish and tech support is available, if not cumbersome, through blogs and forums.
With all that said, I prefer OpenSuse, which is a well developed stable, and functional operating system with lots of features I use it most of the time now except for writing where I depend on a completely functional citation manager (end note) and watching Netflix which continues to stubbornly resist supporting Linux.
So it has been my determination that openSUSE is faster on the same PC than when compared to Windows. Benchmarks aside, what about playing video? Why not point that Windows 7 PC to the itunes movie trailer section (http://trailers.apple.com/section) and play it in Windows if you can, full screen and then try the same in openSUSE. If you can’t get openSUSE to do what you want, then you do not have your multimedia setup properly. Check out this thread for help there:
MultiMedia Checker or mmcheck - Check Your openSUSE MultiMedia Setup in Just 16 Steps
Check your multimedia and get it right in openSUSE and then try your test again. Can’t get it to work in Windows full screen, I am sorry but I can’t help you there.
Thank You,