Linux distribution with good OSS support

I hate the Linux audio systems. It's a mess, everyone knows about it, no one tries to fix it. Anyway, OSS is my choice usually since it supports my sound card, it works just perfectly. Almost no latency, no problem with multiple audio source, no glitches, no skips, its like a REAL Audio system. (Well.. its not GPL so its evil and all..blah blah.. (no wonder Linux won't ever reach 5%)).

So I'm searching for a distro which got a basic/good OSS support. Like .. on the crappy distros.. Kubuntu for example, they removed OSS support. Phonon just says there is no audio device and that's it. Nice.

Any idea which distro might support it (at least have OSS output in apps)..
(I know its a hard question, even if you guess one, fine. I'll install it, test it, just point out one distro since I have no idea at all.)

(Just as a side note: I could use MAC OS X for example, but my hardware is so well not-supported that even hackintosh fails to boot. (Which is clearly more illegal. I'd be fine with buying the boxed OS X.) Haiku got a long way to go...and we are done I guess with the list.)

Apache

Posted 2010-08-05T07:50:24.190

Reputation: 14 755

By the way I've got FreeBSD installed right now which comes with OSS out-of-the-box. However, the package management/upgrading issues are not too user friendly. (Yeah I know it's not supposed to be user-friendly, but still.. I'd prefer to waste just the really portion of my free time with fixing things.) – Apache – 2010-08-05T08:02:21.733

that sounds a bit like a flame. maybe swallow your anger before asking questions ;) – matthias krull – 2010-08-05T12:25:28.237

Ahaha.. yeah. Well.. once you use it, you can't really swallow everything down always and some stuff just comes up even if you don't want to. Like when you are full of food but don't want to waste? Dunno. – Apache – 2010-08-05T14:43:19.913

Answers

If you are willing to take the challenge, Gentoo can be your friend in the situations where you need to do something the casual distros won't do. Just compile the kernel with OSS enabled, put oss in USE flags and programs will get compiled with the OSS support enabled.

Janne Pikkarainen

Posted 2010-08-05T07:50:24.190

Reputation: 6 717

Gentoo's quality been worsening ever since I first tried installing it and started using it. After a few months ebuilds became really crappy. I'll give it a try (as the last on the list since it takes a lot of time to install everything from source).. maybe they fixed these problems already. – Apache – 2010-08-05T08:01:26.290

2About 1-2 years ago the ebuild quality really was falling down, but lately has been improved again. At least that's my impression. :)

Gentoo still has the downside that you need to upgrade it pretty often or upgrading becames more difficult. – Janne Pikkarainen – 2010-08-05T08:28:50.247

2janne is right. gentoo quality is pretty good now BUT ypu have to take care to do things the right way. For beginners gentoo has many traps that one can fall into without recognizing until the system is messed up. So only use gentoo if you are ether willing to read at least most of the documentation or have a PhD in angermanagement :) – matthias krull – 2010-08-05T12:10:20.633

1+1 for Gentoo! It may seem a bit difficult at first, but it has good documentation and links-friendly website. Plus after you master Gentoo, you won't be afraid of any other operating system. It really is the best thing there is! On the other hand it could be Stockholm syndrome talking... – AndrejaKo – 2010-08-05T12:58:11.753

Okay guys, you won. All of you got upvotes for the awesome persuasion. :) – Apache – 2010-08-14T06:59:58.553