On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 09:24:39PM +0100, Will Godfrey wrote:

> As this will be a clean install, I'm wondering what people might suggest as
> for best distro to make full use of it - all my other machines have had a
> progression of debian upgrades so are probably full of crud.

Use Arch. It might sound counter-intuitive but despite (or because
of(?)) the rolling release model it requires very little maintenance. 

The regular glimpse on the homepage's news feed is recommended but
it's been a long time since anything popped up there that actually
required manual intervention. If this happens, the instructions have
proven to be adequate. Other than that, occasionally configuration files 
suffixed *.pacnew/*.pacsave need to be merged and voilà, you have a
crud-free up-to-date system that won't send you to dependency hell when 
attempting to install recent software.

The above might sound a bit like over-optimistic marketing speak but it
reflects my experience and from what I've heard it's not just me. 

That said, Debian testing didn't exactly give me headaches -- it'd be my
second choice for audio -- but my experiences with Arch (quite a few
years now, no re-installation) are plainly positive.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_system_maintenance


greetz,
 -d