[Ardour-Users] The future?

[Arnold Krille]

Hi,

On Wednesday 11 August 2010 15:29:55 Noel Darlow wrote:
> > Ardour/Jack users from the Gentoo or SuSe community, are there any
> > advantages to running a system on these platforms?
> Gentoo is great for building a system exactly the way you want it. This
> could help to squeeze the last drop of performance out of your machine.
> After using portage & use flags for years, other distros seem crude by
> comparison but perhaps that's just the bias of familiarity. Of course
> the downside is that updates are much slower. Personally that never
> really bothered me.
> It's probably easier to keep a Gentoo system reasonably up to date.
> Little steps are easier than massive updates. I find things do go wrong
> about once or twice a year although I suspect that's as likely to be
> my fault than Gentoo. A good tip is to maintain a mirror partition of
> OS & apps then if something gets messed up you can quickly boot from
> that with no drama.

I did use gentoo for several years. Both for productive audio and for 
programming-for-money.

Yes, you can have a stable yet up-to-date system with gentoo. But set aside 
one day a week for updates when more then one machine is involved. And then 
set aside one weekend a month for the "small" problems every now and then.
You learn a lot about linux. But that also costs you quite some time (not only 
compile time but also configuration time).

The straw broke for me when I didn't have time for updates for about three 
months and the following round of updates wasn't exactly swift and easy.
And still that bigger update didn't give me kde4 although that had been 
released for almost a year at that time.

I am now a happy (k)ubuntu user. Updates within one release work completely 
flawless and that one weekend half a year for updating 3-4 machines when new 
releases are out is well spent and mostly goes without any anger...

And many upstream developers hate gentoo-reported bugs as many gentoo users 
tend to do "optimizations" which lead to completely strange (aka brain-dead) 
combinations of compiler flags triggering the funniest errors (and actually 
slowing down the machines)...

If you want to learn about administration of linux inside out and the hard 
way, run one or two machines with gentoo or arch. If you want something usable 
for productive work without hassles, use ubuntu/debian/fedora or maybe even 
opensuse.

Have fun,

Arnold
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