[sdiy] OT: Give Linux a Chance (was: Screw Linux.)

[Jay Vaughan]

>Personally, I prefer FreeBSD (installed on a laptop, dual-boot with
>Windoze-95, with no problems, and on a PC by itself) - a very reliable
>OS, but it's not as good for audio support when it comes to the latest
>versions of everything and ALSA.

what rocks about linux is how easy it is to build your own fully 
functional OS kit from scratch.  its for this reason i always 
recommend people use slackware, or some such other 'build-kit' 
oriented distro.  pre-compiles are for chumps.. roll your own, 
always.  use distro's which promote your own gradual evolution 
towards total control.

remember how cool it was to build your own 5.4" floppy with all your 
stuff set up on it, just like you use it, xtg.exe and all?  treat 
linux in similar light, and bobs your uncle ..  but try to play the 
distro dance, and you may as well give up and just use ubuntu or 
mepis.  they are both damned fine distro's.

i have many flavours of linux in my personal digital sphere, but i 
always like the ones that host and build and boot themselves, and 
quite frankly the diversity is not only refreshing, enlightening .. 
but delightful.  the inter-exchange problems are benign; use linux 
only, and you don't even bother with the so-called 'loss' of not 
being able to use other platform bins .. all it takes is a LiveCD or 
dual-boot/partition into Windows for the 'Windows-only stuff', 
anyway.  even then, you'll watch that 'frequency of use' of that 
dual-booty'  scale go way down, if you get up properly on your linux 
thing ..

to get the best of linux, go gung-ho pro-linux.  it rocks.  and try 
not to get too authoritarian about your distro selection .. fluidity 
is a grander ingredient in the F/OSS world, than it is in Windows, a 
fact many rue frequently .. while others exceed prosperity.  the key 
is to know what your system is composed of, and a good way to easily 
learn that is to roll your own.  anyway.

as far as audio is concerned, even mepis has working jackd for most 
common hardware.  if you want to do linux-audio anew, choose your 
hardware according to the known-working spec of the free distro you 
want to use, test it with a liveCD (any distro worth salt has 
bootable .iso's that'll boot to init), and away you go.

linux audio does, in fact, work and rock, if you go at it anew, with 
fresh hardware built/selected to spec.  just like windows, or even 
OSX, as a matter of fact, often overlooked by those only seeing 
'free' and thinking everything should be a handout .. in other words, 
take the $100 you save on not having to use an OS nobody knows about 
and can't have any control over, and buy yourself a decent 
sound-card.  linux audio does work if you go at it from the right 
angle.

and damn, what a fine field of tools it does profer to the budding 
DIY synthesist, soft and hard alike .. in my honest opinion, of 
course.

-- 

;

Jay Vaughan