So, after my brush with dyne:bolic, I decided to try pure:dyne. PD was originally a revised version of dyne:bolic, but the producers of it decided to go upstream and recreate their distro based on Debian — The Universal Operating System (the ultimate ancestor of many specialized distros, including Ubuntu).

I’ve been using Debian for nearly ten years now, and I believe it is a good foundation to start from.  Unfortunately, the pure:dyne folks have a lot of work to do in order to customize their version to the same extent as dyne:bolic.  For example, where dyne:bolic has organized its apps and utilities into a very hierarchical menu system which makes it easy to find the function you want, even if you don’t know the name of the application, pure:dyne dumps everything into a single menu folder.  Unless you already know all of the multimedia apps you want to use, you have to spend a long time exploring to begin to be productive.  This is a minor complaint, of course, and otherwise pure:dyne looks like it would suit my purposes just fine.

When I tried to run Cinelerra on “leek and potato,” the latest pure:dyne release, I couldn’t get past loading my project.  This was due to the USB hard drive problem I’ve been having with certain kernel versions.  Pure:dyne, through no fault of its own, inherited the same issue.

At this point, not yet understanding the source of the problem, I gave up and moved on to Ubuntu Studio.  Since my drive worked with Ubuntu Hardy on another machine, I reasoned that UbuStu might work better.  Meanwhile, PD looks like a good distro which I would happily use again.  I expect it will be even better in future versions.