Improving linux performance at the foundation level - compiled binary

[vernie]

Linux Mint development is leading linux in the desktop making things work better and easier for everybody out of the box. It works well also with a variety hardware, old and new. I really appreciate how Linux Mint made printing a lot easier than any operating system out there. It is good to note that printing using Linux Mint saves a lot of ink (by default), other proprietary operating systems with the printer drivers provided by the printer company love wasting your ink. Color management is also easy for people who care about correct color rendering. However, there is always room for improvement specially at the binary level of things. This is where every computer hardware can level up to a higher level performance when the compiled binaries are efficient and better than what it is today using glibc. We do not want bloated inefficient binaries when it is very much possible to have a lean and efficient one. It is true that storage and memory are cheaper now but just because they are cheaper we will allow ourselves to start wasting these resources. Programmers must have the discipline to produce lean and efficient codes all the time.

My wish for Linux Mint and any linux distro in general is to consider using musl libc, https://musl.libc.org/about.html as a standard. I've been testing a lot of distro lately, using each daily that I can experience its performance. It is when I use void linux and alpine linux that I was surprised with their fast performance. I have a low specs hardware, every tiny improvement on performance can be seen or felt right away. Now I stay with Alpine linux but I still keep Linux Mint as my go when I need to print while I am still figuring out why I can't make other distro print while Linux Mint did it very easily. Performance efficiency is everything specially for low end hardware. For fast hardware, you'll appreciate it more. No wonder alpine is a favorite name in containers. The apk that alpine use is also way better than apt in terms of performance. One have to try this distro to appreciate.

When we have binaries that is done in an efficient manner, avoid lock up due to lack of resource, we will have a much better system, much better than ubuntu or debian, much better than what is Linux Mint today in terms of performance and stability at the core. The only reason I see there are not a lot of people using alpine on the desktop is because it does not ship with a desktop environment, one have to decide which to use and must install all the components like any DIY projects on the command line. Of course there are examples how to do it but it does not include all the things you want to know. One must have the guts to figure things out. If we put Linux Mint on top of what alpine have already done instead of using debian, it will be the best in performance and user experience in the history of Linux Mint development and linux in general on the desktop and others will surely go in a similar direction. Someone have to stand up and lead and I believed Linux Mint is the best candidate to do it as the team already have the core discipline.

[panorain]

Thank you for this article. I enjoyed reading through it although I do not know alot about system development. I do agree with you about some of the ease with Linux Mint as far as printing but I have to say openSUSE Tumbleweed is just about the same. I do very much like the Mate desktop environment but find all the options in KDE much more robust. I have not used an Ubuntu system for a long while whatsoever personally. I really do not like the Gnome3 desktop environment at all. My question for you that I can think of right now is the following: I own an older Gateway E-4600 desktop computer with 1 gb of memory and I was working with antix on it a little bit and it was basically functional to a point. Do you believe that Alpine is as lightweight as antiX? I am interested in some of your system hardware specifications if you feel comfortable to say.

Very nice article you wrote:
-Best regards

[spamegg]

That will probably never happen, since Debian / Ubuntu don't use MUSL. It would be a monumental undertaking for them to change the underlying C libraries. Would cost them years (maybe a decade) of development effort. Literally every package depends on libc.

You might want to go with Gentoo if you want to optimize things at the binary level for your hardware.

Anyway, Debian / Ubuntu / Mint world is very far away from the experimental / adventurous world of binary optimizing. Just two very separate worlds. I don't see them intersecting any time soon.

This is why Linux world is awesome, you can go with those adventurous distros.

[panorain]

For me personally I do not like to do 'Distribution Hopping', I at least do not think I do but interest in preserving some adequate old hardware is important. I am discovering that some old hardware is dropped much to soon. I was reading an e-book and it was discussing 'exotic' hardware support and so on. I really do not understand why i586 support has been dropped in some distributions. openSUSE still supports 32 bit although it's not very snappy to use (I have it on a Compaq nc-6400 laptop). I believe it is true that compiling from source can be helpful but my run with NetBSD saw just so many things to remember and notes which is good learning but it seemed so slow sometimes.

I was not aware of these binaries the way you speak of them spamegg so this was very good to hear about also.