press on or go back?

[John Martin]

Any thoughts between Linux Mint Debian Edition and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?

After much suffering over the last year with an older machine running
Windows 7 I did two things:

1. Picked up a very nice new Windows 8 machine (making my wife happy)
(and StartIsBack making me happy).

2. With all the data backed up somewhere else, began a project to
rehabilitate the old machine.

Starting from scratch I installed Windows 7 and Linux Mint. New
software on old hardware solved nothing so the next step was a new
motherboard (Gigabyte with integrated everything) and processor (AMD
X4 something or other). This cured all of Windows 7's ills. The Linux
Mint Debian Edition partition mostly works nicely EXCEPT FOR SOUND.
I’ve been googling and poking at this problem without success. In one
of the posts I read, “In Linux, sound either works or it’ll drive you
crazy trying to make it work.”

I chose Linux Mint Debian Edition over Ubuntu even though I’ve been a
happy Ubuntu user since about 8.04 for a few reasons: DE is supposed
to be a bit lighter on the CPU than some other flavours; it’s a
rolling release so I hoped to avoid periodic reinstallations; and
there’s increasing criticism of arrogance and megalomania at Canonical
— the initials, interestingly, are MS. Yesterday evening I had the
bright (?) idea of trying a handy Ubuntu 12.04 LTS AMD 64-bit LiveCD.
Sound WORKS!

Which brings us back to the question: press on or go back?

This isn't a request for help with DE sound. I know there'd be shouts
of "Not the place for that!" (Of course, if someone has universal and
foolproof solution to my problems I'm all ears.) But I thought it
might be worth sounding out (sorry!) the group on the relative merits
of Ubuntu, Linux Mint Debian Edition or other editions, or other Linux
flavours for someone who is not scared of the command line and editing
configuration files but whose Linux knowledge is not deep.

(Also with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS at end-of-life in a few days, there are a
few other machines for which I need to pick a migration path sometime
soon.)

Thanks.


John Martin
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