Article: The Value Proposition In Computer Audio: Nuts, Bolts, and Building Blocks - Building a Home for Your Player Software

[Jud]

First, thanks for the very thorough review. With the enormous number of options even a review of this size must leave out a lot of information, but there is plenty enough here to be very useful.

 

I haven't used FreeBSD in a few years (on which MacOS is partly based), and wonder whether it has drivers for modern cards and DACs. There are a variety of free music players for it (including the old standby MPD). But it involves even more command line use than Linux. Great OS though, especially for server functions.

 

Interesting how different things bug different people. I've had no problems with wi-fi adapters with a variety of distros, but Samba configuration has occasionally turned out to be a pain for me.

 

Manjaro is a more newbie-friendly, GUI-centric version of Arch (it's what I'm on as I type this), and might be attractive to some folks. But if you are familiar with the Debian/Ubuntu/Mint way of doing things and just want to use your OS to get stuff done rather than embark on a learning curve, there's no reason to change.

 

I often use Xubuntu (Ubuntu with the XFCE desktop environment) because it was an easy distro to learn to use, and I've been accustomed to XFCE since back in the early 2000s. Before that I enjoyed Lubuntu with LXQt, but the latest iteration made some changes I didn't like, so back to the old familiar XFCE I went.

 

Both Xubuntu and Manjaro will run HQPlayer and, I assume, Roon. They also run the Qobuz streaming app via use of Nuvola Apps, based on Flatpak, another "container."  https://nuvola.tiliado.eu/app/qobuz/ubuntu/disco/

 

A central resource for summary overviews of, and links to, a very large number of Linux distros (as well as BSDs and other OSs) is Distrowatch: https://distrowatch.com