Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.
My speed increases with Crux Linux are not limited to a 16-second startup and a usable Firefox. I’m also getting a ~30 frame-per-second increase in video performance, over glxgears in Arch Linux.
Of course, as everyone knows, glxgears is no benchmark, and I did spend a day compiling every little bit of software on this machine (plus two or three hours of troubleshooting my font issue yesterday). But on an 8-year-old computer most people consider an antique, that’s a considerable difference.
Compare that with the framerates I got in Arch, only six months ago and with no difference in hardware. I don’t have reliable numbers to compare for Ubuntu, but I imagine it would be a tiny bit worse still.
The way things are going, I may never have to buy a new computer.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Hey K.Mandla.
I’m too busy (and scared, honestly) to try Crux and I’m also way too happy with Arch to adventure myself into another distro.
Even so I want my computer to run faster (not that it isn’t faster now).
Something is funny though… I’m still dual booting WinXp and, since it’s almost at fresh install state, it has a super fast boot – yeah we all know that only lasts the first week of REAL usage of that OS, but still….
I want to make Arch boot even faster. Can that be achieved with the default Kernel? I only have the modules I need loading, but there must be a lot more that can be trimmed. How can I learn this?
There were a couple of times where I recompiled a vanilla kernel for Arch, and it was a little bit faster than the stock precompiled one. I usually made a point of including all the modules I needed in the kernel itself, the idea being that I wouldn’t have to load any modules on startup.
It helps a lot, but the problem was that I couldn’t get Arch to avoid the udev and module loading steps at the start of its boot. Even though the kernel I made had everything I needed, I still had to go through those steps at startup. That was kind of why I went looking for Crux, since I was recompiling anyway, and didn’t want to take the time to do those things.
I learned which modules I needed and didn’t need mostly from the kernel source help files and from Google — and from a lot of experimentation. If you have a fast machine you can afford to make mistakes too, so trial-and-error isn’t so bad.
By the way, if you recompile a few kernels for Arch and they work for you, you should be able to handle Crux with no difficulty … aside from waiting for software to install. 😀