[LAU] Why Debian necessarily?... WAS... Re: The Many Ways of Pam Limits...

This is the big If?.. Why specifically a Debian based distro? Are you looking for the best performing music workstation, a politically correct distro, a server or a general purpose desktop? If the answer is music workstation, why does the choice need to be limited to Debian? Many would argue (including myself).. that a ground up type of distro, like Gentoo, Paludis or Arch are the best way to start. Although Debian if carefully installed will fit into this category. I have also found this personally in experience too. I've tried the pre-built distros for music Studio64, Apodio and UbuntuStudio and GP desktops Mandriva and Ubuntu and found they were a) bloated b) did not contain everything I needed or had old versions of what I needed c) trying to add things not in the repos was more than trivial d) did not perform as fast as as a ground up distro... e) a nightmare come upgrade if any customisations have been made.. Comparatively, I have a number of purpose built Gentoo systems (1 server, 2 media pc's and one studio computer) and while they take an initial amount of work to built, once built they are very reliable, and perform amazingly quickly... Should an app not be available through portage or an overlay .. it is trivial to install from source.. My audio machine is now back on a standard (gentoo-sources) kernel, I have done very little in PAM and get fantastic latency results. Reports from friends using Arch reflect a similar situation. However, for those looking for an easier option.. AV Linux looks like an amazing option.. although it is more of an image that needs modification rather than a distribution per-se. And yes it is debian based... But to re-iterate my question.. why necessarily a debian based solution, why not simply look for something that will give you a reliable, fast performing music machine? Debian may be able to provide this, but why limit the initial question to something debian based? cheers Allan