Hi everyone! Linux newbie here
I'm going to acquire a new budget laptop. Probably it's going to be an Asus X554LA-XO1236D
[CPU i35005U, RAM 4gb, integrated Intel graphics], it's freedos, enough cheap and sturdy; should be fine for me.
On this machine i would, for efficiency and better compatibility with most of the software i use (like Supercollider and Pure Data), install linux, but being new and distros being so many i'm kinda lost.
Aside from being stable and lightweight - the laptop won't exactly be amazing and real time audio synthesis can become quite heavy on the machine - i have to be able to run
Jack2 (
http://jackaudio.org/) as sound server instead of PulseAudio. As far as i understand most of distros would allow to install Jack on top of their deamon server but that isn't acceptable for me, since it could cause problems with some complex audio routings i need to do.
I've been told that Arch could be a good choice since it's so flexible, but as i said i'm a newbie and while i have some programming experience i fear Arch could be too hard for me. And it's also a rolling release and i need something stable.
I've checked some of the audio-oriented distros available but they don't convince me. For example, Ubuntu Studio in full of programs i wouldn't use - like full-fledged DAWs, and Audacity is enough for capturing audio with this machine - and still use PulseAudio as sound server.
Occasionally i should be able to plug some external hardware, like a sound card. I know this is driver-related, but maybe there are distros more friendly than others on this regard.
Since aside for the audio stuff i'd need to perform basic tasks like surfing the web, checking emails and writing texts, I guess the ideal scenario would be a stable lightweight distro with some lightweight but tweakable gui (like Xfce) and the possibility to configure Jack2 as sound server.
That's it. I apologize in advance for any technical error i could have made explaining all of this. Good day to everyone and thank you!
TL; DR: Looking for a stable lightweight distro with Jack2 as sound server.