Favorite Linux Distributions

Thank you for your faith in my abilities, and yes, I confess: I was once a fully (or at least somewhat) fledged Unix system manager, but really, I forgot so much and the rest dropped off from lack of use.

That's the thing: these days, I'm a user, pure and simple, and if it runs Firefox, thunderbird and my music player, and isn't called WIndows, it's fine by me.

But please don't feel that your time has been wasted: I've filed it away under good reasons to use Arch and, one day....

 

Been playing around with Fedora 24 the last couple of weeks with the default Gnome shell as well as XFCE on my Lenovo L440 lappy. I have to say I'm loving the Gnome 3 DE with the Gnome Tweak Tool and the fact that this is the only distro I've come across that supports reliable wi-fi with my admittedly difficult rtl8192ee card. The Gnome 3 DE is great if you want to use the Super/Super + Tab key to minimize trackpad executions.

I recently replaced the HDD with an SSD and find the DE to be quicker and more responsive when configuring the disc I/O scheduler to Deadline vs CFQ on the SSD.

I installed TLP power management, default configuration with the exception of disabling wi-fi power management, and have found a noticeable improvement in battery life.

I'm still running Xubuntu 14.04, low latency kernel, and disabling PulseAudio via terminal for listening sessions on my desktop. I couldn't get MPD to work a while back, but my Linux-fu skills have improved and am going to give it another shot.

 

@fishski13 If you're trying to set up mpd for bit perfect playback / exclusive access, check out this script which automatically generates the necessary configuration for you. You still need to stop pulse before trying to use mpd, though.

 

yes, thanks . i think i tried that script before without success. maybe i didn't stop PA before attempting? i don't remember if i did or not. i will try executing again.

 

Yeah, you definitely have to stop pulse, since it grabs exclusive access of the card by default. Also, look out for it auto-restarting, which is enabled by default.

Some commands I've found helpful are fuser -v /dev/snd/* which will show you what user has access to a specific card. Another is cat /proc/asound/card*/pcm*p/sub*/hw_params which will show the sample rate and bit depth that's being outputted, in case you want to see for yourself that higher bitrate/bit depth audio is being sent to your DAC.

 

No need to disable pulse if you talk to the soundcard directly, you can configure this in mpd. For example hw:0,1 in /etc/mpd.conf as output device. This way pulse can't do shit when mpd is playing yet you can still use pulse when mpd isn't doing anything. Maybe it's changed but this always worked for me when i used mpd.

 

@Riotvan Really? Whenever I try to do that, mpd gives a Device or resource busy error, since pulseaudio has grabbed the device:
Aug 15 12:44 : alsa_output: Failed to open "USB Modi Device - USB Audio" [alsa]: Failed to open ALSA device "hw:1,0": Device or resource busy

 

Somehow, having the basics (not the desktop or the big suite of music-making apps) of KXStudio installed (Mint 17.3) ensures that Pulse never runs.

 

That might be because JACK is included in that package, which could be auto-configured to manage the sound output instead of Pulse? Just guessing here, I've never heard of KXStudio before.

 

I took an old prebuilt dell from 2007 that I had laying around and slapped Gentoo onto a CD and compiled it from source. This took me almost 18 hours straight of nonstop learning linux fun. /g/ told me to do it as the way to learn linux and I haven't really looked back since. I have been using #! (CrunchBang) since I left Gentoo back in 2008. It's a Debian Jessie derivative. It looks like they have been taken over by BunsenLabs since their release but it looks like they have been continuing strong. My setup looks something like this except my wallpaper and font are different. Oh 10/10 recommend DeadBeef to any of you looking for Audio players.
https://scrot.moe/image/HE4l

 

Well this is how i did it but it was several years ago, like i said things might have changed

 

If PA is involved, you'll want to use pasuspender(1).

FreeBSD (CURRENT) for desktop; OpenBSD for VPS.

 

Wow, I could hug you right now. I can't believe I've somehow missed this after putting a lot of time into this stuff. I've literally never heard of pasuspend before. It works great.

(For those who've never tried it, the problem with simply killing Pulse in order to allow other applications exclusive access is that when you restart Pulse to use its mixer again, most applications will not output audio until they're restarted, including Chrome and Spotify. Sometimes they even require multiple restarts, or multiple restarts of Pulse.)

 

Indeed JACK is a core part of the package. One can still output to ALSA devices, though,

KXStudio is, as its name implies, aimed at music makers. I came across it in my hellish adventure of getting a firewire audio device to work with ubuntu, which needs JACK, and only KXStudio would make JACK work properly, easily and simply for me. Back then, I don't think there were any "audiophile" distros. In so far as audio needs any tweaking or optimising, the audiophile distros, if audiophile in any way other than name, probably do much the same optimisation as KX does. And I'm honestly not sure exactly what that is: Interupt balancing, I think, and changing one or two parameters. I think that one of those tweaks stops Pulse from running.

As the name implies, its native desktop is KDE --- but it is not obligatory. Just one has to be careful not to install it if it is not wanted. I use MATE and pretty it up with Compiz and Emerald.

There is a huge selection of music-making tools in the full package. It is a lot of fun to play with synthesisers and stuff, but one can pick and choose. I mainly use the CALF set of studio tools, almost exclusively the EQ.

Stuff: KXStudio Home. Also another forum: Linux Musicians.

 

Arch Linux for speedy desktop and OpenBSD for server. I love minimalistic approach when not using PC for gaming purposes.

 

I recently tried about a dozen Linux distros and I found that I liked Linux Mint Mate the most.
I use it on my laptop, but not on my desktop because I hate dual booting for some strange reason.
I use Windows 7 now. Windows 10 is such a disaster IMO. I gave it a try for months.

Back in the day I used Slackware Linux for years and forced myself to use it for 2 years as my only desktop OS.
This is one thing i'm glad I did because it's helped me learn how to manage a web server I rent.

Back then it came on floppy disks and if you wanted any special hardware support you had to recompile your kernel.
This was when people normally would use the window manager called "Afterstep" (If I remember right).
These were around the days when I was into IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and dialup BBSs were just dying out.

My linux skills are pretty OK, but right now i'm too scared to upgrade my VERY VERY outdated Apache version to a new version.
Most likely I will destroy my web server so nobody could login to my websites.

My remote web server is so old that it still uses a 2.0ghz Celeron, 1gb of ram and only 80GB of hard drive space!

BTW I once remember spending 5 hours to try to figure out how to use my dialup modem in linux.
No GUI way to do it back then. I think it involved a bunch of scripts and PPPD if I recall.

 

Good grief, what's that? No... I do remember things that whistled data down the line and when we thought that 9600 was really fast!

 

Rebooting this thread.

After becoming tired of hacking OSX onto my hardware, I recently moved over to Linux.

Damn, it has come a long way in the ten or so years since I last had a look at it. So many distros, many of them highly polished, comprehensive operating systems (ie elementary os).

I settled on a relatively minimal install, Ubuntu server with KDE Plasma. Deadbeef for audio.

What other distros/software are you fine people running these days?

 

Still running Elementaryos on my ThinkPad, Ubuntu lts core and a beautiful interface. Takes a que from osx with some elements but i prefer this. Tried osx a couple of times but it's not for me. From what i gather getting it working on Arch is still a bit of a hack which is a shame. But interface is very important to me.

I want to switch my main pc back from win10, wts lynx soon, maybe...