On mar, 2014-08-26 at 23:26 +0200, David Adler wrote: in the same vein, and for similar reasons, i can heartily recommend Gentoo, or better yet Sabayon (no compiling, binary packages). along with the excellent Pro Audio Overlay http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page i have been happily making music with Gentoo/Sabayon for 6+ years. the big win is the avoidance of major upgrades with the rolling release. also, your message on Arch has me thinking i should check it out as well ;) peace, w

On Tue, 26 Aug 2014 23:26:04 +0200 David Adler <david.jo.adler(a)gmail.com> wrote: Hi David. I'm alive! ;) Agreed, there is the occasional message on the front page, but it's about once a month or even more seldom. Usually I notice that something changed after I run 'pacman -Syu' but before actually going through with it. Renaming of packages and the likes are a good indicator for bigger changes. No real problems with that so far. I update very frequently though, so if there is a problem, which happens but happens rarely, I know where it comes from and can fix it right away. I don't completely agree on crud-free. If you install software, run it and it creates files in your home directory, then delete the software the crud in your home will stick around, but I guess this is the same with almost every distro. There might be some system level crud over the years, I'm not sure, it didn't cause any problems yet. Merging the occasional .pacnew file takes maybe five minutes and the most frequent candidate is /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist with a hand ful of changes, so not terribly important. AUR could use a going-over though, there's quite some audio stuff there that's not building, no longer available or whatever. Even if someone takes the time it's still somewhat difficult though since speps still sits on most audio packages like a hen. Regards, Philipp

On Wed, 27 Aug 2014 04:13:24 +0200 Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf(a)rocketmail.com> wrote: Don't know if that's something to be proud of. One day it's bound to bite you the proverbial @ss... The problem is also if you put it off, then once you have to do it, you're gonna have alot of work instead of just a minute here and there. -- Joakim

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 03:12:01AM +0200, Philipp Überbacher wrote: Same here. ;) ... Admittedly, I might have overindulged in marketing-speak here. But package managers not touching stuff in $HOME is a feature, not a bug. And it's not the distro's fault if some nanny-software unsolicitedly clutters it with directories like "Audio Projects" or "Video Projects" (yes, including the white space). Orphaned configuration files in home are usually tiny, with just 16 gig of HD I would have noticed if otherwise. I haven't seen system level crud accumulating over the years but maybe I haven't been looking diligently enough. Whenever "accidentally" installing bloated stuff like a Java VM, 'packman -Rsn' will elegantly solve this -- the distro is not to blame. :) Agreed, there you touched a disadvantage of Arch compared to Debian. Many packages that would be installable via apt are only found in AUR and are of mixed quality. The speps-phenomenon is awkward indeed, especially considering (s)he's filed as "trusted user". In many cases, the AUR really is more of a starting point for DIY than a serious repository. regards, -david

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 03:56:37AM +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote: My own machines and all those at the CdM and CdS have been running Archlinux for the last four or five years. It's the right distro if you want to stay in control, but that means you have to invest some time and learn how to set up things. For the first install you'll have to do some things manually (e.g. partition disks, install a boot loader etc.), but the wiki explaining all this is very good. Package management via pacman is excellent and things get updated rater rapidly. Support on the arch-general list is OK, but note that the Arch devs can be on the arrogant side if you ask questions but fail to read essential documentation first, or if you question their wisdom. Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)

On Wed, 2014-08-27 at 01:53 -0400, Blaise Alleyne wrote: The OP is an experienced Debian user, KXStudio, AVLinux and Ubuntu Studio are ok, but perhaps the OP wants to test another approach. An issue with AVLinux might be the architecture. My favorite from those distros is Ubuntu Studio. Keep in mind that Arch Linux is one of the distros that made the transition to systemd a long time ago, Debian and Ubuntu will do it soon, that likely could cause issues you don't want to experience for an "office" machine. Replacing X (Ubuntu) also could cause issues.

~ Russell I have used KXstudio for sometime, including studio sessions with paying customers. While it may not suit the 'super user', it provides a good, useable platform OOTB. The exclusive tools (cadence, Carla, etc) are quite useful IMHO. The only thing I find is that it needs a pretty beefy hardware platform. KDE is a hungry resource beast. I don't have any issues at all on the i5 w/ 8gb ram box but it's too heavy for older laptops ( my Vaio dual core 1.6 for example). I've only found low latency kernels within Debian stuff, no rt or realtime. I'm just a basic user, even after all these years. Been trying to find other OS' that have rt kernels and lighter front ends and tht are not Debian based. In my search thus far, this leaves me with Arch or Gentoo. They are more old school and require reading, and learning new things! :) it may be time for me to do just that... For the new musicians just looking to alternatives away from M$ & Osx, I think the boxed distros are great. It's a bit much to ask a musician to learn arch or gentoo terminal geek speak right out of the gate AFAIC.

On Fri, 29 Aug 2014 18:19:04 -0300 Federico Galland <federicogalland(a)gmail.com> wrote: Thanks everyone for you comments. I'm inclined to give Arch a try, if it doesn't work I'll fall back to debian. -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.