"64 Studio is a highly-regarded Debian- and Ubuntu-compatible
multimedia-creation distribution. It's rock-solid stable and usable
out of the box, without any special tweaks. I tried Ubuntu Studio
first because I'm writing a book on audio production using
Audacity, and since Ubuntu has so much name recognition that seemed
like the obvious choice to base the book's examples on. But Ubuntu
Studio proved to be nearly unusable for me, and it required
numerous post-installation tweaks to make it suitable for
multimedia production. I thought the idea of a special Studio
distribution was for all the necessary customizations to be the
default. Stock Ubuntu and Kubuntu with the same tweaks were more
stable.
"But after many months of struggling to make K/Ubuntu perform
satisfactorily enough was enough. First I tried Fedora 10 with the
Planet CCRMA packages, and it was all right but still a slowpoke.
My studio PC has an Athlon 64 CPU, two GB RAM, and nice SATA 3.0
hard disks. Quite a respectable amount of horsepower that should
not be bogging down on routine operations such as changing views in
Audacity, scrolling, opening files, and such. It's had all the
usual tweaks to improve performance: unnecessary services turned
off, no screensaver, real-time kernel, and so on."