[linux-audio-user] That Windows feeling...

[tim hall]

On Monday 04 September 2006 20:05, carmen was like:
(Ianas originally said:)
> > I find it deceiving that
> > in 2006 there are still some basic problems with the major flagship
> > distros.
>
> whoever said SuSE and FEdora were flagship? flagship distros are debian,
> gentoo, and ubuntu, with arch and mandriva rounding out the top 5. or
> REdHat/Novell in the corporate world. Fedora is just redhat's lame attempt
> to offload work on RedHat to others by emulating the debian model
> unsuccessfuly.

In your opinion.

The term 'flagship distro' isn't really common parlance, so it doesn't really 
make sense arguing the point. There are plenty of people on this list happily 
using SuSE and Fedora+PlanetCCRMA to make music. Your reasoning sucks.

> nobody said you had to try Studio64, Musix, Agnula, Demudi, StudioToGo,
> PCLinuxOS, UbuntuStudio, or wahtever 'derived from another distro and
> improved but still proably not fully working \'music out-of-the-box\'
> support'. 

You are not comparing like with like here at all. DeMuDi and UbuntuStudio are 
simply methods of installing and configuring Debian and Ubuntu respectively 
for multimedia use - Musix and Studio to Go! are live CDs AFAIA. 64studio is 
a Debian derived distro specifically aimed at 64bit architecture, but it has 
not been declared stable yet, so it deserves to be given a bit more slack. 
Ubuntu is also a Debian derived distro. Agnula, incidentally, is not a distro 
at all, it's a European free software consortium, which currently maintains 
DeMuDi.

Off-the-wall misinformation doesn't help anyone come to an informed decision.

None of the major distros provide a low-latency kernel or realtime security 
model that works out of the box, hence the development of DeMuDi, 
PlanetCCRMA, UbuntuStudio, Gentoo's pro-audio overlay and the proliferation 
of various derived distributions and live CDs. These approaches are 
frequently recommended by people on this list, because we tried them and they 
worked for us. None of this software comes with any guarantees and the 
developers are often not working to any kind of mutually agreed timeline, 
which means that distro maintainers frequently have to juggle applications in 
varying states of compatibility. For this reason, most stable software 
collections use older versions of applications, which don't have all the 
latest features and may still contain bugs which are considered non-critical.

Linux is essentially a DIY approach to computing, what you don't pay for in 
money, you pay for in time, effort and reading. I think it's a fair deal. The 
other payback is that we on this list learn to become efficient beta-testers 
and submit useful bug reports rather than making unqualified complaints.
-- 
cheers,

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim
We are the people We've been waiting for.