I work at a community radio station, where we rely heavily on Audacity for recording and editing. We have been using Audacity on an older version of Debian for some years, and it worked quite well. We recently changed to CentOS 7 (in order to accommodate our automation software), and have been encountering many issues with Audacity.
We are now considering using a different distro for computers with Audacity, and I was wondering if there is a ‘best’ one? Any info or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
There’s not really a “best” distro for Audacity, but the few people in the Audacity team that use Linux are on Debian / Ubuntu based distributions.
I was a long time user of Debian Stable, and I still do some testing on Debian, but I mostly use Xubuntu. Currently I’m on 16.04 LTS, but I’m intending to upgrade to 18.04 LTS soon. The other team member that uses Linux regularly has just upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS.
We see view few problem reports from CentOS users, but that could be because:
they don’t have problems
they are more experienced users and are able to fix problems themselves
they don’t use Audacity
CentOS is certainly one of the more popular Linux distributions for servers, so it could be a combination of all of the above.
From my recollection, most of the problems that we have seen on CentOS have either been related to build problems stemming from incorrect library versions, or problems with the sound system (drivers or PulseAudio issues).