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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I installed arch, and it was so much faster that it is now my favorite distribution.

Ubuntu by comparison is a slow intrusive distribution.

I do use debian-ish by way of raspbian.

Whether a distro will seem "slow" or "fast" is almost entirely down to which desktop is installed by default on that distro. But users should know that they are not limited to that default desktop, and they can just type a few commands and switch to some lighter desktop if their hardware doesn’t smoothly run the default. Therefore, it is rather a waste of time to completely switch to a different distro just for the sake of speedups.

i had gnome on ubuntu and gnome on arch, and arch was significantly faster. I should try a debian install.

Probably the background services and the fact that Arch doesn't come with AppArmor or SELinux running OOTB.

I've done some testing and if you install minimal Gnome on Arch and minimal Gnome on Debian Testing/Sid (Gnome version on Stable is few versions behind) you pretty much get the same speed and memory usage. Much faster than Fedora and even Ubuntu.

To install minimal Gnome on Debian, use the netinst.iso, untick everything on the last step where it asks you to choose a DE, log in after installation is complete, do apt install gnome-core and reboot into a very minimal Gnome. I write this from that setup.

The desktop is relevant, but so is the default selection of background services. On Debian, choosing a lightweight desktop is trivial (no need to download a separate image, unless you're specifically doing a live install) and the background services are a lot more streamlined as well.

I love Arch compared to Ubuntu, but I haven't noticed a speed difference. What kinds of things do you see a difference in?

Pacman is way faster than apt (or used to be, when I was using it).

If you want to make pacman feel really fast, try DNF.

brb while I install Fedora or CentOS8 and wipe out all my stuff. In other words, both of those distros on the desktop are the same good idea as arch on the server. Speaking from experience.

Oh right, it does feel that way. Somehow the package manager didn't come to my mind when I said that :-) anything else you've noticed?

getting to the desktop is instant. shutting down is instant.

I have an arch server. I just tested and can do "sudo reboot", it becomes unpingable after 2 seconds. The turnaround from shutdown to sshing back into it is just over 20 seconds. (I'll bet it would be faster if I didn't have the 5-beep no keyboard sound at boot)

Arch comes with a desktop? :-) (Which desktop are you talking about?)

the one with the desktop was gnome. I think I installed gnome and gnome-extra

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