[linux-audio-user] The best distro for music creation

[Brian Dunn]

The possibility of using and contributing to studio
quality audio software is really what first sparked my
interest in linux.  So I installed Mandrake 10.1,
because someone gave it to me and it sounded cool. 
Since then i've had a lot of fun with it, using their
mm kernel and running jack with seq24 and trying to
come up with something cool enough to use ardour for,
and everything ran relatively reliably.  BUT...  The
lan componets of the distro simply don't work, the USB
plug and play is more like
plug-and-if-i-feel-like-it-play, and the printer
suport is also compleatly unreliable.  So, just use
mandrake for when i'm feeling musical and reboot to
Micro$oft whenever i need to do anything else, right?
well, that's getting old.
So i took a friends advice and started playing with
gentoo.  After all, it's well documented. and it was
fun writing all those config files and oh so neat to
DIY, but then i tried to install Gnome, and after like
a 7 hour compile that i can't yet figure out how to
use i'm thinking, what have i gotten myself into...

So does anybody out there have the best of all worlds?
good free documentation, reliable hardware support,
binary packaging, a fast audio kernel, and config
files that don't get re-written by some user friendly
script somewhere that would be oh so convinient except
for the whole doesn't work thing?

If your system works the way you want it too most of
the time, i want to hear your opinion.

gratefull,
Brian