I had originaly posted this to the demudi mailing list, someone from there directed me here, sorry for all you that are gettingthis same message twice for having not found this list first :) I need some help in making the decision whether I should return to using a prefab audio distribution such as demudi or if I should continue trying to tweak a vanilla linux system into a music production workstation. I am trying to weigh them against each other in a fair way. So far I have done alot of distro hopping, I have used the fedora planet CCRMA package, slackware + audioslack, and of couse sarge + demudi. I admit that I enjoyed planet CCRMA the most, it was the most painless of the three to make operational and it had the newest apps in it, but I switched from using it because I was told that other distros had superior performance (which I haven't really noticed). These days I am running Arch Linux, attempting to transform it into a suitable music production system. I like the idea of a premade DAW package because regular distros don't bother packaging many audio programs, and often it is a real PITA to get them to work on a general purpose distro because of gcc conflicts and stuff. I don't want to spend too much time fighting with my operating system because I would rather spend that time being productive. At the same time, prefab audio distros frustrate me because they are such a small niche, if I break something in demudi I dare not ask for help with it within the debian community, and I have trouble finding other people using the same audio package as I am that are able to give me the occasional clue. I have been flamed out of message boards and mailing lists when looking for help with demudi, I learned to stay away from the debian community unless everything is from the official repository, and I learned it the hard way, ack. There is also the bloat issue, installing a blank distro then adding the audio capabilities lets me install without the options I dont need and to create the optimal set-up for my specific computer, rather then using a setup designed for the lowest common denominator. But I have been at it for a couple weeks and still don't have an operational music environment, packages are hard to find and even less community support is available then with the music distros. It seems like gentoo is the most audio-ready of the general distros, but there is no way I am going to fight with gentoo just to use their sound packages. Arch would be great for this purpose if only there were more people to help the cause, unfortunately there are only a few arch musicians and there isnt anyone maintaining the hard-to-build packages because they are too hard. So I need help thinking of the advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, The tedious but customizable scratch installation vs the convenient yet 'black box' prefab installation. what would be absolutely perfect was a customizable audio distro, or a general distro that officially packaged music software, maybe something like that will exist in the future.