[LAU] good linux distros for audio

[Patrick Shirkey]

lanas wrote:
> Le Lundi, 23 février 2009 17:25:45 +0100,
> mikk <michiel33 at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
>   
>> Who can explain to me why it seems to be so hard to get a stable
>> audio and video environment in Linux (not requiring recompilations
>> and intricate tweaks) while this problem seems to have been solved
>> quite satisfactorily in Windows? What is the fundamental reason for
>> this?
>>     
>
> For me it's simple: everything worked fine and then 'they' came up with
> Pulse Audio.
>
>   

I just don't see this problem for consumer multimedia.

I have been using pulse audio over the past year and I haven't had any 
issues with it other than it took a couple of hours to get used to the 
two interfaces. I just installed a brand new laptop with Fedora 10 and 
sound worked out of the box. The video camera worked out of the box. I 
can see flash natively with the 64 bit adobe plugin. I was able to 
quickly get access to the non-free repo and now have access to all the 
multimedia tools I need to get up and running.  Most audio and video I 
stream via flash these days anyway. I rarely download but if I do I only 
need vlc or amarok to play the data.

Granted I haven't tried to get the rt kernel running yet or any of the 
professional tools installed on this setup but for a stock standard 
install Fedora 10 has everything correct afaict. I had to do a similar 
install recently on a desktop and I had everything I needed up and 
running within a week thanks to yum and svn. I don't foresee this being 
any more difficult on my new notebook.

I do agree with you that some of the things that have been removed over 
the past couple of years to make the desktop more like a m$ windows are 
a step backwards. I am hoping that the trend will be slowly reversed but 
I doubt it. The more people buying netbooks with ubuntu means the more 
simplified/automated the gnome and kde desktops are going to become. 
That's fine for non technical users as we power users can easily get our 
favorite desktop running with minimal effort.


> Also, while at it:
>
> kpdf worked fine and then 'they' got rid of it and replaced it with
> some Okular in the newest KDE 4.x.
>
> The Konqueror web browser had nice icons to zoom in/out of pages
> and then 'they' removed them totally.
>
> You could drag and drop files from a file manager to a console window
> and then 'they' removed that functionality in KDE 4.x.
>
> I could assign Alt-1. Alt-2, etc... to switch desktops and then they
> made that really hard to assign in KDE 4.x (still haven't found it)
>
> OK, what else... hmmm... can't find anything else.  For the moment :-)
>
> I don't know if this is progress, but sometimes I doubt it.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-audio-user mailing list
> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>   


-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.