The Speed Factor -- Kubuntu vs. Gentoo

[Bruce Marshall]

On Saturday 14 June 2008, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Well, no, his request was "how do I make Kubuntu as fast as my friend's
> Gentoo?", and I say run it on the same hardware.  I'm sure he can fine tune
> a few parameters in the kernel, but if he can prove a speed difference that
> would be obvious to a user, I'll eat a hat...

I would agree with this...

I would doubt that any *normal* user would be able to see a difference by 
tweaking the kernel unless that user is doing something VERY heavy with their 
computer, like weather analysis or such...   and that makes them an abnormal 
computer user.  

The normal things that would affect the observed speed of a computer would be:

CPU speed
RAM  (if in short supply)
Disk I/O

all of which are hardware.

No amount of software tweaking is going to make much difference unless there 
is a serious problem with the software setup.