[Ardour-Users] Which distro best supports Ardour using the Delta 44 (ICE1712)?

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 8:47 AM, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>   I'd encourage you to look into what's involved in keeping the
>> machine up-to-date and historically how well the distro handles
>> running new revisions of the apps you want to run. For instance, WRT
>> Ardour, if the devs choose to move to add a new library then do you
>> have access to that same library, etc.
>
> this will not be true in the future, unless you insist on build ardour yourself.
>
> --p
>

Building Open Source from source is a part of the landscape.

Your point may be true Paul, or it may not. If today he chooses
distroX and then at some future time he finds that distroX doesn't
currently support a library you used for some future version of
Ardour, then it *could* (not will) be an issue. I hated my days using
Fedora for exactly that reason. What's going to change this going
forward? Binary releases with everything built in?

However the point of my comment goes well beyond Ardour.  Access to
the right revisions of the right libraries at the right time has
always been an issue in Linux and I know nothing that changes that
going forward. Ardour is the app he asked for today because he said
he's just getting back into this but we both know that at some future
date he's going to use other apps which only compounds the potential
for this problem.

And please, I'm not knocking Fedora. After using it for a couple of
years early on I didn't like it but that doesn't make it bad. If
Fedora is right for you (whether CCRMA or not...) then that's great.
All distros have issues and there is no _right_ answer to distros. I
tried to be clear that Gentoo isn't perfect either. It's a bitch on
slow machines or with slow Internet connections, and it takes a lot of
effort to learn to do it right. I'm only encouraging him to choose
wisely by understanding the issues and looking at the big picture.

Cheers,
Mark