Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso

the way i figure it is if the baby os Menuet can do it …a small footprint AND a gui ....
why cant a linux distro ??. maybe its cos menuet is coded in asm rather than C/C++ ?
sometime check out the size of menuet ..its tiny size is brilliant for an os.

One of the reasons for the size of most Linux distributions is that they include a huge number of drivers and the like, and also many options that people may use. As an example, my fileserver has the Apache2 web-server on it and that includes many/most of the loadable modules for all sorts of things, but uses symbolic links from an 'enabled' directory to the modules to "turn them on". If they didn't do that, then the instruction to set up the many functions Apache2 can do would have to "first download and install the following..."

I'm not convinced these days by "coded in assembler". A good C compiler will do a pretty comparable, sometimes better, better job of optimising the machine code for most things. More likely a smaller size is more a reflection of omitting things. That's absolutely fine unless one wants those things. Horses for courses.

As Menuet nails it colours to "not within Unix or Posix standards..." you may find you're limited to what they offer, or you'll have some significant work porting applications to it.

Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso
i was hoping for a linux distro under 2 gigs.

I'm curious why that matters to you. The smallest USB flash drive from Curry's is 16GB. I can get 256GB for ~$30 just down the road.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/flashlinux/ Claims to run from a 256MB USB drive.

Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso
if you would bear with me…...when you load reaper linux version ..under the x at top right hand side what latency does reaps report in millisecs ?


Bear in mind that this is an old-ish PC. It's reporting ~11/34ms. Conky, the resource monitor that's bundled with AVL:MXE reports that it's using about 2% CPU whilst idle. Reaper is now available Linux-native.

Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso
i wonder if my audient audio interface would work in linux.
i love it for its v low latency and its not given me one prob ever in a years use.


If it's USB class complient, then it certainly should. If it has non-compliant features, like built in mixers or audio processing, then it may lose those features.

A brief look around suggests that some Audient interfaces may not be class compliant (why not?) and some "work perfectly". Which device? BTW, I think this is one place where a runable USB version is handy ... it'll likely let you know if the device you have works properly.

Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso
i WAS gonna use the audient as a stop gap while i saved...

If you're happy with it, assuming it does work well with Linux, why change?

Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
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