I have recently grown to love Linux for its fast reliable virus free and clean uncluttered operation for word, photo, spreadsheet and especially internet use. As a pro musician I've used Sonar on Windows XP for years and it's a great programme, however for various reasons I would like to abandon Windows completeley and I like Audacity, Ardour and Rosegarden. Although basic, these would get me through most of my projects as a guitar teacher. My questions are: is it considered essential to install a real-time kernel or can you get by nudging audio by 50 ms or so. Ubuntu Studio would be the answer I guess although on my HP dual core I get mouse and keyboard freezes with Ubuntu after 9.04! - weird. Fedora has always been rock solid on my machines although I understand that there is no real time package for versions after F12. Are there musicians out there that use Fedora? - which versions and what set up. Any replies would be of great interest. Thanks

I would personally choose Fedora over Ubuntu any day, it is a "cleaner" distro in my opinion.

My "pro audio" (LOL) needs are very limited; I use my laptop as a portable recorder for rehearsals, so I'm not concerned with latency.

That being said, you can find a real-time kernel (and lots of other goodies) for Fedora/CentOS at: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

50ms of latency depends mostly on your hardware and the computer load... Do you have fine tuned jack, I know you can give soft real time permissions to the jack group, adding your everyday user to the jack group to improve latencies. And if it isn't sufficient, compiling a real-time kernel isn't so difficult, don't be afraid...
My guess is that if you can do it with your hardware under windows, it would be doable under linux with some tuning.
I'm far to be a power musician linux user (nor a musician in fact), but I'm playing bass-guitar (plugged on my soudcard) with hydrogen (a linux rythmbox) and / or lmms, without noticing any hearable delay on a core 2 duo laptop, and without real-time kernel...
A last word, as far as I know CCRMA repository works on fedora 13

Many thanks for your replies. I'll try tweaking JACK or alternatively install F13 and use the CCRMA repo.