Re: [LAU] Until now Debian seems to be the right decision :), better performance than Ubuntu

If you compile it yourself then ensuring it fits with the other packages is a bit trickier ... it is the interaction between libraries and between packages that a distribution solves for you. If you prefer to compile most of the multimedia stuff yourself, then staying with debian stable as your base could be good. You may find yourself compiling a number of the libraries because they won't be the right version in stable. /opt and /usr/local are the place to put locally compiled things, /usr/local if you are using the libraries provided by the distribution, /opt if you are also compiling the libraries so you can keep them separate. Ardour is taking this path with its ardour3 alpha releases, putting everything in a folder so that it does not rely on the distribution libraries at all. The packages are large, and compiling this is not easy. But ... if your plan is to compile yourself, consider gentoo instead - it is a distribution put together with compiling your own stuff in mind, and much more flexible and suited to this approach, with ways to manage the process and create your own templates etc. I believe that there is an active audio community there which would be quite helpful. I think that mixing debian.org and debian-multimedia.org is a mistake for your purposes, because the debian-multimedia.org libraries will replace the debian.org ones, and this often causes problems for the other audio packages that are not on debian-multimedia.org, and you will be using plenty of them. YMMV. Simon.