just a few random thoughts. * the best distro i have seen myself _IS_ jacklab. unfortunately, it's outdated at the moment, and not available for 64-bit architectures, but it's still closest to the "perfect" (imho). * to speak about ubuntu studio - gnome sucks. too much gnome crap is definitely not a way to gain simplicity & performance. * any distro WILL be imperfect for linux audio, since it WILL also be trying to be good for generic desktop use at the same time, thus it WILL suffer from performance penalties & waste precious memory / cpu / disk i/o resources. * (imo) PERFECT linux system for audio should do AUDIO jobs very well, and all those unnecessary options to turn it to another 1024 things SHOULD be removed. as for me, i'm building the whole system myself, enabling all optimizations for my hardware & omitting anything i'm not going to deal with. but i know that way is inacceptable for the vast majority of linux users... -- sex, bike, open source!