Tuesday, May 27, 2014

My Thought's "Ubuntu Studio ~or~ KX Studio"

By Avatar JayR Cela

   These past few weeks I have been experimenting with Ubuntu Studio and KX Studio, both of which are excellent examples of how Linux can actually hold it's own as an Audio Video content creation suite, the former is based on the XFCE Desktop Environment and lightening fast on a wide range of hardware configurations, the later KX Studio uses KDE, a somewhat non-intuitive DE, however extremely flexible once you get a grip on things.

    I'll sum this up briefly until I have more time available for further testing. Ubuntu Studio is a total no-extra brain power required installation and operation, you should be up and running within an hour, as a mater of fact I would feel comfortable  installing this on a friends computer, wither or not they are interested in A/V content creation. KX Studio, will require some reading on your part. Myself being new to the current KDE Plasma DE, a lot of reading was required, but once I finally figured out the concept of Widgets and  and Capsules ( similar to the old Next Step OS, it is a truly Object Oriented DE ) the amount of flexibility is unsurpassed in the Linux world. You can do virtually anything your heart desires.

    KX Studio also ditches QJackCTL in favor of the in-house developed Cadence, and several other modules vastly superior to the aged and somewhat cantankerous  QJack. No you wont have to relearn any of the old QJack trick's you have acquired of the years, just put them to use in a much more intuitive and easy to set up environment.

    The KX Team has also done a major rework of the current KDE desktop, stripping it of most of the annoying and totally  unnecessary eye-candy, gimmicky stuff no one really needs in order to be productive. As a mater of fact during the installation one of the final steps is to chose the KX desktop tweaks or continue with a standard KDE install, by all means choose the former, you wont see much difference ( performance wise ) between Ubuntu Studio with XFCE and  KX Studio with the vastly improved ( KX Tweaked ) KDE environment. As a matter of fact I like it so much, I have decided to install it on all 3 of my workstations, and push my CinnaMateStudio project into the background as I wait for the Cinnamon DE to fully mature.

   I can not say enough good things about either of these Ubuntu 14.04 based distributions. If you want fast and now total ease of use, go with Ubuntu Studio. If you don't mind doing some research, quite a bit of reading, and unlimited flexibility, then defiantly go for the gold and take KXStudio for a spin.

http://ubuntustudio.org/

http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/

JayR :_)

2 comments:

MoonDragon said...

I completely agree on all counts with the author.
Both are excellent choices..
but KXStudio does seem to offer more possibilities in the long run, although saying that is not completely fair, as Ubuntu Studio offers more than what most people would need (I mean people like musicians and recordists, production people).
I guess kxstudio looks more up to date... it's quite imporessive, really

JayR Cela said...

Hi there MoonDragon

Thank you *Linux Rocks* LOL

JayR Cela :_)