Folding Forum

This thread has two parts.
First off, I've been experimenting with multiple different Linux derivatives over the past few weeks(Everything from Ubuntu to Zorin OS to Scientific Linux) and can't help but wonder what others are using for their systems.
The second part, which command-line Linux derivative do you think would yield the best performance and which GUI version do you think would yield the best performance?

I have no idea, but just FYI the latest version of V7 is 7.1.50. You should upgrade if you haven't already.
And I didn't know you could create a poll! I never noticed that button before! Learn something new everyday...

Performance does not depend on the version of the OS to any measurable degree.

. . . pause . . . let that sink in . . . resume

The performance depends almost entirely on the version of the FahCore that does the processing. The FahCores for Linux are the FahCores for Linux so it doesn't matter.

On rare occasions, a new version of a FahCore is released and when that happens it will be automatically downloaded whenever a WU is assigned to you that requires the upgrade, but before long, that project will be assigned to all of the Linux clients and everybody will have the new version. Sometimes a new version will change performance, but often there is no measurable change, just the ability to process a wider variety of assignments.

It won't be long before the V7 client replaces all of the V6 clients. It will be delivered with three components: A GUI (called FAHCommand) which provides a nice human interface, A command-line client (called FAHClient) which can be run either as a stand-alone client or as a back-end processor that does the work for FAHCommand, and a GUI viewer which makes nice pictures of proteins provided you have sufficient OpenGL.

I'm exaggerating very slightly when I say the Linux version makes no difference. There is more than one version of the code that decides which thread can be dispatched when you have more threads than you have Cores. There's more than one way to manage various levels of memory. There's more than one filesystem format. Etc. Each one of these aspects can make a difference in some cases but for most of us, they won't really matter.

Fedora 13, 14, 15, 16
Ubuntu 9, 10, 11, 12
CentOS 5
Mint

Lot's of VMs, doesn't make a difference, like bruce said.

Your processor speed and core count are what determines performance the most.

Lubuntu 11.10 64-bit, for the simplicity, more than any thought that it being light-weight should provide any performance boost over Ubuntu regular.
I am a bit curious though, if distributions with Linuxcore 3.2 or newer will gain performance over the 3.0 that Lubuntu is running.
Having a rather new 3930K Intel cpu it feels like it would be kinda logical that it would gain from software updates to fully perform.

Running CentOS 6 here and in the past have run RHEL.

Currently running SMP and GPU on CentOS 6 (Heavily customised, basic X running FluxBox with SLiM DM (which was a nightmare to setup) but entire OS setup to be as frugal on cpu/ram usage as possible) with reasonable results. YMMV.

Ubuntu 11.10 64bit