[RawShark]

To answer the original question, and not to start a debate about it, Ubuntu is still probably the easiest distro to use. Yes, it has it's quirks and often you will get sound or video issues, but this is the case with Linux in general. The fact that you cannot get into a dependency loop and that the APT repository is far easier to use that YUM or any of the other software managers (it generally downloads ALL required files, not just the ones you ask for) is unavoidable, and for this reason most Linux users seem to prefer Ubuntu

No matter what your distro, you will inevitably need to spend some time, somewhere along the line, getting a game to work correctly. If I had a dollar for every minute I have spent investigating sound issues in Quake 2 on my Ubuntu machine, or indeed NO fragging sound in Return To Castle Wolfenstein, I would be very rich indeed. But guess what? Even though I am not financially rich, I have learned an awful lot by committing to fixing these issues (which I did).

What I'm getting at is, besides that most of your issues will be bugs in the Linux kernel itself and not the distro you are using, is that patience and the willingness to tinker under the hood are part and parcel of using Linux, period. If you want your games to work out of the box, then Windows is probably the way to go (but you better like viruses, spyware and paying for sh*t too).

BTW, the next Ubuntu release, just weeks away, is one of their LTS (Long Term Support) releases. These are generally completely bug free and supported for five years. I only ever run Ubuntu LTS for this reason, hence I'm currently gaming on Ubuntu 8.04 and will be upgrading from there to the new 10.04. If I were you, I would try 10.04 before giving up on Ubuntu altogether!

Hope this helps. I've detailed a lot of how to fix the sound issues I mentioned earlier at different times on my site.

On another note, UT Team, I love the new site design. Well done

This post has been edited by RawShark: 22 March 2010 - 11:03 AM

[Mikedk]

Beast, on 28 March 2009 - 09:44 PM, said:

Ubuntu is nice for the support and the usability. But I have been having extreme frustrations with sound issues (looked all over for ts2/ mic guides). I have updated to 9.04 beta and I'm unimpressed with the sound deal.

I dont know if you have fixed this issue or installed another distro but how about trying linux-backports-modules-alsa-jaunty/karmic/lucid/or whatever version of ubuntu you have insatlled-generic, and see if that'll do the trick for your sound.

kind regards

[3akoh]

Try Fedora Core. Specially, the new version that's coming out this month. Fedora has frequent updates, so it tracks latest drivers and software reasonably well. Most things just work out of box. It's annoying however, that you have to upgrade your OS so frequently with Fedora (once a year or so). If that's an issue consider also looking into CentOS (a copy of RH Enterprise Linux) because it's supported for a longer period of time.

[sneakers]

3akoh, It is not called "Fedora Core" any longer. They dropped the Core part a few releases ago.

Fedora Project

I dropped Ubuntu quite a while ago. I can't stand the whole sudo thing and the way Ubuntu is setup just plain rubs me the wrong way.

Fedora is a much cleaner, slicker distro IMO. Plus it actually has the backing of a real linux company (Red Hat). Linux Torvalds (the creator of the linux OS) uses Fedora, not that that actually matters but I thought I would mention it.