Alright, probably just going to piss people off in stupidity here, but can I get some help in finding a distro right for me?

I've been sick of Ubuntu's crap for a while now. Unity is goddamn abominable, and as much as one can rationalize its existence because GNOME decided suicide was the best option, if you take a deep dark look at Shuttleworth and Canonical, you know it was only implemented because of the marketability of mobiles and netbooks. But that's not me, and that's not what I want, and I'll be damned if I let them make decisions to break me in the future.

Yeah, I've tried other DEs (I've tried all the *Ubuntu's, from bloated KDE to simple LXDE and even MATE, which I find rather cute oddly), but it runs deeper than that. With April's release, I found that something in the new release conflicted with *something* I already had. So I backed everything up and paved it over. When I started with a fresh install, something broke again - the same error, I suspect. I don't actually know, because what's erred is a general zlib thing and I can't find anything referring to what the error might be - it hasn't gone away, despite everything I've tried. Now it just says "Ubuntu's had an internal error" or something like that but no info.

Something I noticed is that despite claiming out of the box support for things, most of my time gets spent tracking down the configurations for my hardware. It seems that, for the "everybody" orientated distros out there, the hardware in my computer is similar enough to more popular things that it shares the same drivers/etc, but is different enough that general oses will use settings that render things useless, or worse, potentially hazardous. This is everything from video to sound to wireless and everything in between.

I feel I should note, I flirted for a while with Linux mint, but after digging into it, I can't say I even understand how it isn't just another flavor of Ubuntu - I mean, the community's nice - but simply having a different packaging priority and your own labels doesn't really feel distinct to me. They're ultra-dependent on Canonical for really every aspect of their system. It's like an expansion pack, really.


What I want, preferably, is power and performance. I make music as a hobby, and really would like something for general use. And with that said, I'm familiar enough with things to know that I want a low latency kernal and better yet, one compiled for me.

I've looked at other distros - tried them out with the help of virtualbox, which I really can't say is something that can give me a really accurate feel for things, but has helped get an impression at least.

At first I stayed kinda simple. Debian was nice, but ultimately it felt like stepping into a time-warped Ubuntu. Install was a breeze, everything was generally the same feel. I know this, and I knew it; while I might be using babbys first lunix generally as it is, I've been toying with other oses for years, Debian, OpenSUSE included. At one point this was even a tribooter (also UNetbootin), with Ubuntu studio, 7, and a hackintosh, until I decided that everything Mac did that I wanted Linux did better and with more control. Sure, no loops, but once you've heard shitty garageband scores once you'll never take anything made with it seriously again.

A bunch of people I know always rant and rave about Fedora, though. I wanted to try it out, but every time I wanted to their douchebaggery actually put me off. Once I got around to actually trying it out, I realized that, for me at least, Fedora really couldn't offer anything new to the table. And, sorry to say, but my lasting impression of it boils down to "Fedoras are for hipsters". I really don't have anything against Red Hat, but ultimately, they're the same as Canonical. SUSE too.


So, away from that I decided I needed something not for the general masses, and, ultimately, something I could bare only updating every once in a while. Took a look at a few things here and there, but eventually I decided I wanted everything to compile from source instead of premade binaries. That way, instead of being generally dependent on what others think is best for everybody, I can fine turn things for my needs. I mean, I have a quad processor and a decent sound card. There is no excuse for Jack not to be able to get a decent latency or a good buffer size.

Arch was interesting, but the degree to which it was precompiled bothered me. A lot of the default settings I know wouldn't work for me, but that's a given at this stage of the game. I ended up putting it on hold; I had a lot of issues connecting it to the web after moving from virtualbox to a small, real partition.


At that point I tried out gentoo, which I really liked at first. A chroot install I loved, being able to do that instead of waiting through hours of silence and no manual (I only have one computer) was nice. The Kernal was a bit overwhelming, but things worked out. But things went sour as I tried to start installing my favored programs. It seems like portage only got it half way right, by maintaining their own repositories instead of directly to the source. Which really bothered me, because some things had a mix mash of being ridiculously up to date and ridiculously out of date. Which invariably broke things. Compiling using make isn't really that much fun, even compared to portage and emerge. Of course, I might just be a monkey.


I was tempted to try Arch again but haven't had the time. Really liked the idea behind Gentoo, but it just felt like they were doing it wrong. I've actually been eying Sourcemage and its cousins, because I think they're doing it the right way, but I've been worried about trying those because it seems every one of their developers is about 2 languages removed from the only two I understand. Also the history of Sorcerer is drenched in metaphorical GNU/Linux blood that I don't want to be a part of. The theme is cute though.


Really, though, what I've been suspecting I want to do is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_From_Scratch

I really like the customizability that allows and I really like self-made feeling. Also, the install process, which allows me to multitask. However, that said, the shear scope of the project means I really have to watch every bit I do and make sure to customize everything before I even know what it is, which is a mighty steep task. Ultimately, I've failed that twice now as I keep running into some arcane problem with binutils that blocks me from creating a sane working environment.


Really I don't have anything that complicated. 64 bit, i5 (intel with 4 cpus), and some other really trivial things with names that are large strings of numbers that I can't be bothered to remember at the moment - which I don't think matters, anyway - if I'm going to have the control I want over what gets installed and what doesn't, instead of putting my faith blindly into the gods of Canonical or whatever, then I'm confident I'll have the tools I need to make things good.

So, any recs? Or has everything I just said made no sense?