Okay, so Debian testing with XFCE was pretty fast on my desktop. I remembered my sister had a old laptop that she hadn’t used in a while, so I was determined to install Debian on it to see how it would perform. Here are the specs:
- Sempron 1800MHz CPU;
- S3 video card;
- 1GB of RAM (shared with video card).
I told this desire to install Debian on an old laptop to a friend and he said he also had a old laptop and he was considering throwing it away. Here are the specs of his old laptop:
- Sempron 1800MHz CPU;
- Onboard ATI video card;
- 512MB of RAM (shared with video card).
My friends laptop arrived first (I was living far away from my sister) so installed that same minimalistic Debian with XFCE as DE. Indeed it had a respectable performance. The batteries of this old laptop are still good so I ended up getting a free laptop! Just like I posted on my second post, a up-to-date OS on outdated hardware. The install was pretty easy to do, since I had already done it on the desktop. The only particularity was that I also installed the “laptop” package (listed in the install program).
Now I had hardware to spare! I didn’t really needed a laptop, so I could leave my desktop alone and play around on this old lappy! I decided to install yet another distro on my friend’s laptop: Arch Linux. I read a lot about this distro and I wanted to see how it compared to Debian.
Unlike Debian, Arch Linux is a bleeding-edge, rolling release distro. Bleeding-edge because the software available in the repositories are very up-to-date. Rolling release because Arch doesn’t have versions, you don’t download the Arch version X or Y iso, you download a snapshot of Arch and then, after installing everything you need you just keep your system updated by downloading the newer versions of the packages installed in your system, so you just have to install Arch once and then you’re set.
Another two (and very related) characteristics of Arch Linux are: the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy and the fact that it proclaims itself to be a lightweight distro. Summarizing the KISS philosophy in a single line: the user is the one who should choose what to install and how to maintain his/her system, it’s up to the user to configure his/her system. For example, after installing a CUPS daemon, if you want it to run at startup, you have to manually set it by editing your rc.conf, and adding cupsd to the daemon array. And that’s why Arch is a lightweight distro, the only processes running are the ones you told it to run. Just a side note, on Arch you’ll end up using the terminal more than most distros, you should get comfortable with using the command line.
I read on the web that Arch’s install was a pain and that you had to do a lot of things manually. But I thought: “Okay, it might be a pain, but if this thing works as advertised I should only have to do it once.” Indeed, you have to do a lot of manual editing, but another strength of Arch Linux is that the wiki is very well written, there’s even a install guide for newbies. I didn’t use the guide on the wiki though, I used this one (in Portuguese) instead. So, the install was a “pain” (in the sense that it took me some time to do it, but it was great for the reason below), but there’s a good thing about it, you end up learning a lot about the OS as the install goes, simply because YOU have to do much of the work. If you’re nerdy like me, you’ll like it, but if to you a computer is just a means to an end, then stick with another distro.
The “bad” thing about arch is that you sometimes have to do manual interventions when you update the system. In my experience these are rare though (below you’ll see that I’ve been running Arch for a while). Also, I read on some places on the web about people braking their system after updating. Never happened to me though.
Anyway, I did a minimalistic Arch Linux install with XFCE as DE and as far as I can remember I installed almost the same software comparing to the Debian minimalistic install. Indeed, Arch is faster. I didn’t do any benchmarks (had uninstalled Debian to install Arch) but everything seemed faster. It was the same feeling I had when I swapped Xubuntu for Debian, only that the difference was somewhat smaller (I felt more performance gain on the switch between Xubuntu and Debian than between Debian and Arch). I searched the web and the majority of the pages I found said that the performance between distros would depend only on what you had installed. But there I was, I knew I had installed almost the same packages on those two distros and the performance difference was noticeable. I was decided to test this out, so I used Arch a week or so, trying to time mentally how fast the system felt, that is, how much time applications took to run, boot time, package unpacking and installation time, etc. After a week I formatted the drive (yes, I know, if I had to install Arch again I’d have a lot of work to do) and installed Debian.
Arch indeed seemed faster. Like I said, I have no evidence, only my perception (which to me is a lot!). So, again, I formatted the drive and installed Arch on my friend’s lappy again. To this day, that’s what’s running on that lappy. And after the good experience with Arch on the lappy, I decided to replace Debian with Arch Linux on my desktop. I never looked back and Arch is still my distro of choice. Thanks to it’s install process I have a very good idea about the OS, I know how to configure a lot of stuff and I know what’s running and what’s not.
Around a week later my sister’s lappy arrived and I ended up installing Debian on that as to have a stable system in case Arch broke, like I read on the somewhere on the web. Arch NEVER broke on me (yet, anyway). Below is a (bad) picture of my sister's ex-laptop running Debian.
PS: Another cool aspect of ressurecting these old laptops is that it is the "green" thing to do. What I mean is that these laptops were going to the dump, and maybe they would be polluting the environment. Giving these laptops some extra life I avoided this potential environmental damage and got two free laptops! :)
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