HOW WE TESTED…
Media creation is a very broad spectrum. The requirements for something such as drawing with a tablet might be very different from those for recording music. For one thing, setting up an art station might be a good use for an older computer, whereas audio recording tends to hit the hardware resources to a greater extent.
Many of the smaller support tools for audio work, such as utilities and plugins, can be quite fiddly to get working. For example, there is often no universally agreed on location for plugins.
Most Linux installations require quite a few tweaks to work efficiently for audio creation and we wanted to make sure that each of these distros was adequately optimised in advance. It’s not really fair to say that a distribution is ready to work with audio if, in actual fact, the playback and recording would glitch and stutter even though applications such as Ardour could technically run.
Media creation is a very broad spectrum. The requirements for something such as drawing with a tablet might be very different from those for recording music. For one thing, setting up an art station might be a good use for an older computer, whereas audio recording tends to hit the hardware resources to a greater extent.