Media-creation distributions
We’ve chosen the best-known dedicated media-creation distro, Ubuntu Studio, as the overall W winner. KDE Plasma is a good fit for media work as it follows the traditional paradigms of how desktops work, while offering clarity and ease of use. The user interface is great, the application selections are sensible, and the customisations that have been carried out will save a lot of work, particularly for beginners to this area of Linux use. There are intrinsic advantages to being part of the Ubuntu family when troubleshooting.
AV Linux has a good selection of applications and tools, and it’s well optimised. The MX Linux side of things adds dozens of useful tools to the stable Debian base. For better or worse, it’s designed for the user who likes to tweak things. We were impressed by its low resource usage, and it would be our pick if we had to make the most of a low-end computer for media work. It’s the media-creation distro for people who know their way around Linux and aren’t afraid to roll their sleeves up when it comes to configuring things.
Fedora Jam is similar to Ubuntu Studio, although it’s based around another great base distro, Fedora. It uses the excellent KDE Plasma desktop to superb effect. It wasn’t quite as aggressively configured for excellent audio performance as some of the others, though, which might mean extra configuration work for the user. Fedora Jam also fell short because it had only a few graphics applications and no video editor. It’s obvious that it was designed with music creation in mind rather than general media work.
The Modicia OS website fails to fill us with a great deal of confidence about the support available. However, the distro itself offers a good set of applications and tools, and has an attractive user interface.
Like Fedora Jam, Fedora Design Suite has the solid base of Fedora underneath the hood. We
