> I think you're right that the situation is getting worse, but I don't > think it's the distros fault - I think it's hardware. As PCs get > cheaper and cheaper, the proliferation of hardware varieties has become > exponential. For example, in 1998 99% of machines had a PIIX4 chipset Oh I agree with you there. But there is also the fact that the race is on to make the first truely usable out of the box linux desktop, and that means superficial ( not meant in a bad way ) integration that solves 90% of the users needs for 90% of the users, in an easy point and click way. This means Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, etc will try to make sure that *most* soundcards do *most* of what people want in *most* scenarios, but that invariably makes it more difficult to gut those average case scenarios and tweak things for pro audio. I think unfortunately we're in the growing pains stage of that. It's like, it use to be medium hard to install linux at all, and hard to get pro audio working. Now it's easy to install linux and very hard to get proaudio working. I think I'm going to do a dual distro installation with a shared home partition and see how that works out. Ubuntu and Arch by the looks of it, because Ubuntu really has done a great job of everything else I use, just no audio drivers. Arch is a tough slog, but at least you're learning useful stuff! Can anyone tell if sharing the home partition and swap partition is a good plan? I'm thinking seperate boots, seperate /s, and shared swap and home. Iain
