My brief flit toward Linux Mint underscored how much faster Crux was than anything else I’ve tried. As soon as I was finished exploring the Mint underpinnings (and trying to break it, because that’s fun to me 😈 ), I blanked the drive on the world’s ugliest laptop and reinstalled Crux.

I put together much the same setup as before, with a minimal Openbox system and a few utilities — Leafpad, emelFM2, Sakura and Firefox. (Believe it or not, Firefox is actually quite usable on this system.) With GTK Change Theme and ObMenu rounding out the utilities, I have an excellent backup system poised to attack … anything that might cross it’s path, that is.

The downside is that I now have a 450Mhz machine that boots 3 seconds quicker than a machine that’s rated at more than twice its CPU speed. My Arch system is still clocking in at around 27 or 28 seconds to boot.

And the downside of that is that I’m starting to throw an askance look at the little parts of Arch that I otherwise abide. Like that 10-second udev uevents lag — what can I do to get rid of that? Move back to static /dev? And how does one do that exactly?

I already recompile a kernel that stays tighter to this machine, and keeps all the drivers in the kernel, rather than loading them. And I chip away at every loose corner I can find, like tacking on a timeout flag to the /sbin/udevsettle command inside /etc/start_udev.

Still, it’s hard for me to ignore a machine running a less than half the speed of this one, and booting faster. These are the things that keep me up at nights. Sigh. The life of a speed freak, I guess. 🙄