Hi
following some kind and enlightened advice here recently, I have decided to try a Linux distro other than Fedora. I have 3 .iso's on my hard drive. My machine is an ASUS N55s Intel i5, with 500gb HD, 6gb RAM and 2gb dedicated GPU memory. It's no slouch, but it's old. I'm looking for a lightweight desktop environment that will let me tweak layouts, themes, shortcuts etc, and an OS that will provide painless and n00b-friendly package installation, running PD, Supercollider, Processing, Arduino, Audacity and Ardour mainly.. I've chosen Mint Cinnamon, Xfce and Ubuntu Studio, and I'd appreciate your insights and experiences. I do recall trying out Ubuntu Studio a few years ago. My machine ground to a halt, was very sluggish and felt 'bloated', without allowing much leeway to tinker and tweak. With the little research I've done, I'm leaning towards Xfce. I'll be spending tmoro afternoon doing the install.

Looking forward to your advice
Brendan

Fuck it, I'm going back to Fedora

@brendanmac If you want to avoid ever having to compile anything, I'd strongly suggest using Ubuntu (16.04 or 17.10) and leveraging one of the Purr Data PPAs. Then all the relevant dependencies will just get handled automatically.

Then, not only will you be able to "apt-get install" it, but you'll also be able to get the newest stable version by doing a system update.

Link:

https://bitbucket.org/l2orkubuntu/l2orkubuntu.bitbucket.org

from the install file:
"Install the core build requirements using your distribution's package manager.
For Debian, you can install the compiler chain, autotools, & gettext with:

sudo apt-get install build-essentials automake autoconf libtool gettext

For libraries, you will need to install the "development" versions which include
the source code header files. In Debian, the ALSA development package is called
"libasound2-dev":

sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev

don' know if any of this applies

Just to bring this thread to a close, I was about to ask which OS both of you prefer (and find such ease with a PD install). Which Ubuntu? I naively thought this would be easy. . . ps I am 55 yrs old, and hold 2 Masters degrees and a PhD in Creative Digital Technologies. I have never felt more confused and n00bish

Xubuntu

@brendanmac Actually-- doe you still have Mint installed? If so, which version?

18.3 Sylvia. Just did a fresh install of Xubuntu. Purr Data won't install correctly, sigh.

@brendan That's probably because we don't have any binary packages for Xubuntu. We have them for Ubuntu. They are different distros and you'll run into dependency problems if you try to install a package on a distro for which it wasn't built.

Pick a distro you like and I'll compile a package for you when I get a chance.

Thanks, could you recommend a distro/version? 16.04.4 LTS from here https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

@brendan Here's a deb that should install on Linux Mint 18.3:

https://pdblog.nfshost.com/pd-l2ork-2.5.1-mint_18.3-x86_64.deb

Let me know if it works.

Hi @jancsika, and thanks for this. I have had an absolute nightmare of a weekend. I installed Linux Mint, and was rooting around in the terminal, trying to manually install dependencies for pd, got side-tracked into updating other stuff (I can't recall the exact steps I took), and I broke grub!! Something to do with "initramfs". Dead computer, no bootable media found!! So, on a borrowed Windows machine I managed to create a bootable pen drive, and I have returned to Fedora (27). I now have PD (vanilla) and SC talking to each other over OSC/UDP. I found the process so much less painful, using PlanetCCRMA and RPMFusion (

). This current machine is very old, I'll be investing in a new machine soon, and when I do I promise to try Mint and the package you kindly provided. Thanks again for you input and support.

. . . and I am still very very keen to use PurrData, over vanilla, so Mint might still be the way to go.

I also suggest AVLinux, since it's super light and it's perfect for low-latency audio ( ardour etc ).
It's based on Debian with very beautiful XFCE ,plus KXStudio repositories for tones of audio/midi apps.