[LAU] Gentoo as a DAW platform

[Mark Knecht]

On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Brent Busby <brent at keycorner.org> wrote:
> Since there's been some discussion recently about questionable choices
> from the distros about the way they build multimedia apps that people
> depend on, sometimes building large numbers of packages against problem
> libraries that can't just easily be swapped out and corrected, what is
> the prevalent opinion about Gentoo?  Does anyone here have any comments
> about getting actual work done on a Gentoo workstation?
>
> I should say while asking this that I have done source based upgrades of
> the base OS and package system on FreeBSD for a long time, so I'm not
> unfamiliar with some of the ups and downs of this approach (days of
> compiling, packages that never really do quite integrate together,
> etc.).  But FreeBSD isn't a very good multimedia OS, partially due to
> limitations in the kernel, which was made for TCP/IP, not for low
> latency.
>
> Should I have my head examined for even thinking of depending on Gentoo
> for a DAW workstation (which will also do some video editing and perhaps
> gaming on the side)?  Or would this be an effective way to avoid all the
> distro politics and have my binaries compiled from nearly vanilla
> upstream and linked to whatever libraries I darned well want them to be?
>
> --
> + Brent A. Busby         + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
> + UNIX Systems Admin     +  banging on a million typewriters will
> + University of Chicago  +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
> + Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
> + James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky

Head examined is both a bit strong and possibly very smart.

I've run Gentoo for years. I'm VERY, VERY frustrated with the distro these days.

That said I don't find it difficult to set a machine up using Gentoo.
It really doesn't take much of my time to get the machine running,
just a lot of computer time over a couple of days. The payback for me
has always been stability, but for the last 6 months anything but.
Lots of problems for me on pretty much every platform except AMD64 and
AMD64 doesn't support some fun apps like ChucK and SuperCollider.

ALL my X86 machines have issues and have required huge amounts of time
and some money to fix. (Non-audio software though so it might not
effect you.) Support the Bugzilla has dropped way off in the last year
with the recent herd of maintainers. Please don't get me wrong - I'm
VERY appreciative of what they do, and the Gentoo pro-audio overlay is
still a pretty great package for what we do, but if the platform
stability goes away then Gentoo is FAR too much work to warrant the
effort it takes to keep it maintained.

- Mark