Discussion on:

10 obscure Linux distributions (and why you should know about them)

Recently I came across Dream Studio, http://www.ardour.org/node/3832, which is optimized for audio and video production needs. It was amazingly easy to install it, and then use Ardour and Jack to complete a multi-track audio production.

Ubuntu Studio 10.10 is audio/grfx/video production oriented distro.
They have a good theme too.
Different parts can be added to Ubuntu without doing a full upgrade.

http://ubuntustudio.org/

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http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

A series of Linux ready-to-go appliances, developed by an experienced Linux crew. From the website:


Save time and money with 45+ ready-to-use solutions: discover and leverage the best free open source software. Deploy in minutes on bare metal, virtual machines, or in the cloud.

It just works: designed for ease of use, built and pre-tested by a community of experts.

Smart backups: built-in automated backup and restore software provides the easiest backups ever, with powerful system migration capabilities.

Secure and easy to maintain: auto-updated daily with latest security patches.



Joomla, LAMP, MySQL, Drupal, Samba, etc all built on proven, stable Ubuntu 10.4. One can download appliances as ISOs or virtual machine images ! You can try before installing on bare metal, because ISOs also double as live demo CDs. Very cool stuff !

Could have really gone without the need to put a "faith-based distro" in there. Completely unnecessary and irrelevant. That spot should have gone to a distro with a useful but different purpose, such as running on extreme legacy hardware.

...because Metal music brings so much to the world of "useful but different" your comment stands out as just an opinion on the Christian faith.

This is another distro for audio and video editing. http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

Linuxmint

Maybe this isn't obscure enough for you. I run DSL from a live CD on my old, obsolete Pentium II (Win98) system. It couldn't be simpler, runs on minimal systems, and lets me see what this Linux stuff is all about!

I just had a musician friend who got a retired machine from work and wanted to use it in his studio. He got "sticker shock" when he found out what the professional studio software cost. When I said "this is free" and "you can try it without doing anything to the computer" he was thrilled.

Thanks, Jack.

Serendipity for me!

Crunchbang Linux. Based on Debian, uses the Openbox or Xfce window manager. Very light-weight, runs on older machines and netbooks with limited system resources.