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
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)