[linux-audio-user] Distros these days? What a mess!

[Stephen Hassard]

iainduncan at telus.net wrote:
> Gaaah! I haven't had to install a new linux in ages, and now am faced with doing
> so. Is it just me, or is the state of linux pro audio on the major distros a
> total mess right now? Fedora core 5 seems to require MUCH tweaking to get any

I've been pretty disappointed at the state of the various linux distros 
recently, and ended up settling on Arch Linux after having gone through 
the most recent versions of Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE, 
and MEPIS.

http://www.archlinux.org/

It's a fairly lightweight distro, which behaves very *bsd like. If you 
use the i386 build (not the more recent x86-64 builds which don't have 
the same package support) a good amount of community packages already 
exist. The overall speed of the system is quite good and is definitely 
better than most that I've tried.

I've found that pre-built binaries are missing for some of the key sound 
apps (like zynaddsubfx) but community supported 'pkg' makefiles exist 
and work well (available at the url below).

http://aur.archlinux.org/

All you need to do to build an aur package is download the small tarball 
(with contains a makefile, and perhaps some patches), extract it, go 
into the created directory and do a 'makepkg'.

Package quality seems quite high, and most packages are up to date.

I've been using kde as my desktop environment of choice, and have found 
its quality to be much better than kubuntu.

Have fun,
Steve