Fastest Linux Distro

[TheCelloDude]

Hey im switching from fedora to somthing cuz fedor is really slow, so whats a really really fast Linux OS?

Heres my setup:
AMD Athlon 1Ghz
Oxford (somthing like that) motherboard (no idea what model)
60 gig HD
nVidia GeForce 2 MX

any suggestions, thoughts?

(by the way, if its a complicated install, or somthing that requires lots of code installing, please state if you could help me with the process or give me a good documentation for it)

[kriss]

Gentoo compiles everything so it will be optimized for your system. If its worth it is another discussion, but you should give it a try if you're up for something interesting.

www.gentoo.org

[smindinvern]

Either gentoo or LFS, both are extremely fast because they are compiled entirely from scratch.

[Ethyriel]

There's no doubt that Gentoo will be a little faster because it is source based, but I do think source based is over rated as far as speed goes. Any minimalist distro will get close, so Slackware and Arch should be in contention, I think. Arch has some pretty decent documentation, though not on the level of Gentoo or Debian, and also a fairly good wiki. Slackware has been around forever, so of course there's a ton of documentation, and also a dedicated forum here. Unfortunately it doesn't have dependency resolution out of the box, and you have to use a third party repository with third party tools to get that.

I could help out a bit with Arch, but I've been awfully busy lately.

[mechmaster]

i second arch, its super fast and i can also help out.

[sether]

All distros are fast so long as you don't install anything on them.

But seriously, Yoper should be fastest in theory because of all of the optimizations that are done to it. It's not really though.

Just pick a distro you like, install a lightweight window manager, and everything should be pretty fast on your hardware.

[Stormblazer]

Gentoo's real benefit (and LFS's too) is the customization you can do. I really don't recomend it to someone who's new to Linux though, ESPECIALLY not LFS.

The programs you use are a lot more important to how fast it will be. Lighter weight programs often have less features, but run much faster. It just depends on what you want more than anything else.

[Giro]

You could use Debian sarge it also has apt-build so you can compile your debian system with optimized flags if your that way inclined

[TheCelloDude]

i should really study a linux book or somthing

*fwoosh*

[valan]

The fastest distro is one which you will compile yourself and optimize for your hardware. It won't (can't) get any faster than that. LFS and Gentoo let you do this.