[ale] sharing an experience....debian....

[Keith Morris - IQ]

Hi all, just wanted to share a quick experience and get your opinions if 
you are willing.

I have been using linux off and on since Redhat 5.1 and exclusively for 
the last 3 years at home.  I have pretty much been a redhat man with no 
complaints.  I use Fedora Core 1 on my 2 main machines at home (both 
1.6GHz).  Well, recently I got a PIII 866 to play with and installed FC1 
on it and the speed was really quite sluggish.  Played with a few more 
distros which I wasn't really happy with.  Well, I've always been afraid 
of Debian with it's infamous hell-installer, but with it's new Beta 
installer, I decided to try it.

After a pretty painless net-install, I was totally shocked with the 
speed of Debian.  Easily twice as fast as Fedora on the 866 using the 
*SAME* software (Gnome 2.4, KDE 3.1.5, OpenOffice, Evolution, XFT 
support, antialiasing, etc.) I still have not gotten the sound working, 
but believe that I will be able to (with a few posts to the ALE list :)) 
The only main difference is that I formatted / with reiserfs instead of 
ext3 with FC1.

I was wondering if anyone could guess why debian would be sooooo much 
faster with basically the same "Desktop" type of configuration? Do many 
of you use Debian?

I will probably stick with Debian on this machine to learn about the 
different ins-and-outs.  I absolutely *love* apt-get for debian.  I have 
used it with rpms on redhat, but it seems better with debs...dunno...

Anyway, thanks for letting me share.

Keith Morris
Creative Director
Design / Effects
IQ television group
http://www.iqtv.com