I’ve had a look and I can’t find any good recent threads on the topic.
What is a good choice of distro in 2026? Does it matter any more?
At the end, you can do everything with every distro (almost every distro). Some are a bit easy and ready-made. Best distro, is the one you know best. IMHO.
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Well, I’m asking because I read, for instance, that MX Linux (Debian based) doesn’t allow you to use Ardour with JACK (not that you should, these days, AFAICT; even Jack’s creator, who is incidentally Ardour’s creator, nudges you towards ALSA). MX Linux is one of the two “audio-focused” distros that pop up everytime (the other is Ubuntu Studio). I remember Paul stating his dislike of Ubuntu though.
Hi, do you mean MX Linux, or AV Linux (which uses MX for it’s build system)? If your do it is set up out of the box to use Ardour with PipeWire which both supports a traditional JACK workflow with ‘pipewire-jack’ and also choice to use Ardour with ALSA. The former implementation of JACK is no longer needed for using Ardour in conjunction with other JACK-aware applications. AV Linux also gives you ‘Cable’ the most comprehensive PipeWire control app as part of the base install as well as having pipewire-jack properly linked to work with apps that want to connect to JACK.
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Distro doesn’t seem to be a big deal but Arch/CachyOS are what I know best. They don’t get in my way and there are rolling-updated packages for everything I use with Ardour. Arch wiki seems to be the best linux knowlegebase I know of, too.
There is also librazik, which is very seldom mentioned, but comes with an astonishing amount of audio-software (which migh make sense for some, and no sense for others).
https://librazik.org/base-site-LZK/english.php
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I am not aware of ever having stated a dislike of Ubuntu.
I do not nudge people towards ALSA. ALSA is frequently the simplest, most stable, and simple backend to use with Ardour. That’s always been true (since the ALSA backend was added). However, that doesn’t work for people who want to have multiple applications share their audio interface or do inter-application audio & MIDI routing. For that, one of the implementations of JACK is required (JACK1, JACK2 or Pipewire), and on most modern distributions, Pipewire is already set up (to some degree). That’s what I use as my “daily driver”.
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Fine (although I do remember something about Ardour in Ubuntu being broken), so now that we’re at it, what is really the practical difference between JACK1 and JACK2? Never really understood what it was.
JACK1, JACK2 and Pipewire are 3 different implementations of the same protocol (they each provide a JACK server, and a library to be used by clients when talking to the server). Functionally, they all do mostly the same thing, but because their implementations are different, there are some differences.
JACK2, for example, runs by default in a mode where port connections and disconnections do not cause clicks (though this adds latency), and it can run multiple clients in parallel (the uility of this is debatable and very workflow dependent). The Pipewire implementation means that JACK clients are part of the same audio system as all the other audio-using applications on a system, regardless of whether they use JACK or not.
etc. etc.
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Amen to that. For me it’s Ubuntu studio.
I think that was the specific packaged version shipped with Ubuntu. I believe many of the distros have, on and off, messed up the packaging of Ardour.
I have never had any issues, nor heard of any issues, specific to running the official version on Ubuntu.
Cheers,
Keith
Second this. Running the 24.04.4 LTS version on old (2014) Lenovo deskside tower, 32 GB, 3 TB spinning disk, NVidia graphics/X11. It’s really solid for me and runs Ardour 8.12 and LSP suite fine. Haven’t tried Ardour 9.x on this machine yet, but will do so soon.
(EDIT: correct version of Ubuntu Studio)
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Haha, I do recall a few occasions where it was not warmly recommended in your pre-bundle days… 
There was a couple of years there when Ubuntu’s packaging of Ardour was routinely broken and very frustrating, perhaps the good that came out of it was your self-bundling of Ardour to eliminate all Distros from kludging it up. Anyway water under the bridge as they say, your non-admission of Ubuntu dislike opened some dusty cupboards in the back of my mind and gave me a good chuckle…
Anyway water under the bridge as they say, your non-admission of Ubuntu dislike opened some dusty cupboards in the back of my mind and gave me a good chuckle…
Heh… I might almost hear Paul quote Elizabeth Bennet in reply: “In such cases as these a good memory is unpardonable.”
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The older we get, the more it sucks. My wife just told me tonight that we need to buy a jet ski, and it was my idea months ago. I certainly would have never agreed to that, no matter how drunk! lol
“Happy wife, happy life” | “If mama ain’t happy… ain’t nobody happy!”
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Sometimes I think, couldn’t there just be one really well-curated audio, video, and media distro? Maybe some foundation could run it, and the developers of the current audio distros could join forces. But then it would just end up being one more distro, and then I woke up.
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There is also dynebolic which
- is beta
- not installable
- no apt or dpkg
Like other audio distros besides librazik the amount of audio software is rather small.
And Fedora Jam ( had a too short try to comment )
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Many Linux people are fickle and they want everything exactly how they like and expect to have their idealized perfect Desktop and a tweaked and functional workstation no questions asked and very little compromise… You CAN run any Distro you want and it’s POSSIBLE to make any of them work for Pro Audio but I will tell you as a Debian User and Distributor for many years a stock Debian install isn’t even in the ballpark for Audio work and neither are most other mainstream stock Distros without help, it’s pretty much the same situation for 20 years now no matter what people think or say.
I find it laughable that in Windows and MacOS people might change the Desktop wallpaper and the titlebar colors and after that every program and application just looks how it looks with different colors and UI toolkits for each one, nobody thinks twice, they just use it as presented. In Linux you could put out the most incredible workstation OS ever and if the menu button can’t be changed or if GTK, QT can’t all match perfectly or if it doesn’t have the window compositor you think it should have then all bets are off, it’s just garbage then… 
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All of these projects are run in spare time by volunteers, of course as across the Linuxsphere in general there is some lack of unity and the ‘my way is the best way’ ethos, but I think in general most people are drowning in their time restraints and the extra hours and organization required to join up and learn new skills for collaboration are just not there…
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