Okay, I have an Asus A8NSLI board with an Athlon 64 and I dunno, maybe 8gig Ram and Windows has crashed for the last time so I've finally had enough and I'll make it a Unix machine.
I have a new 1Tera drive and I'm all set to go.
Which brand of Unix/Linux can you advise me to go for?
The machine sits inside a home LAN of 7 machines that I look after, after a fashion.
I would like to do some video and audio editing on it - I have Magix for Windows and I use Audacity. I have web sites and run IIS on Windows, develop them (all simple) on Kompozer and upload with Filezilla. I have Kindle on the pc. I use Musescore. I have some wireless IP security cameras. I run Visual Studio, kidding myself I'll get back into programming one day.
That's about it. That's all I do.
It'd be nice if it'd do all of that. No drama if it won't. I have other machines with win10 I can continue on if necessary.
I had an old XP machine some time ago that I thought to devote to watching those IP cameras and put Xubuntu on it for that. Found it couldn't handle it. Too slow to be useful. ISpy was the software. All I could find for multiple cameras and record ability.
Got a surprise from that for I thought all Unix variants would be super quick.
Putting GUI's on it has stopped all that, I think. Right?
I would go back to command line but it is a visual world now, I can't watch IP cams with a command line OS can I?
So this time it's a much newer board, cpu and bigger drive. I expect no problem. But I'm asking. That's why I've given all the details.
What would you advise and what could I expect from it?
First, about that XP machine. The OS's job is to stay out of the way 99% of the time while programs sit there and run; a better OS doesn't make programs run faster, just does a better job of staying out of the way. So if Windows XP doesn't have the power to do something on your hardware, neither does UNIX. I made the same mistake a long time ago, trying to install a modern Linux distro on a Pentium (no II, III, IV, or D). 32 megs of RAM. It swapped like a wounded moth 
Further, distro's advertised as "easy" are aimed at modern consumer PC specs and have grown-up resource requirements. Install that loadout on an old computer(Anything with an XP sticker is likely 10-15 years old) and it will be sucking sand. Your best bet for that kind of distro is to install on a computer one or two models behind - old enough its hardware is well-supported, but not so old that its performance is poor.
What Linux is better at than Windows, I think -- even in the era of quad-core computers - is sharing processing power so things don't lag out as much. Linux couldn't do miracles with my ancient, dismal Duron, but it could run a compile and an MP3 player at the same time without stuttering.
If you want a general purpose Windows like experience with a lot of default choices made for you, try Ubuntu. If you want to build a super lean task-specific machine, try Debian.
Well I've got Mint running on it now. In fact this is it, I'm using it right now.
It's not a tiger. I suspect perhaps not as quick as XP was when I first put it on this board/cpu (call that a machine, maybe?) but it's quick enough, so far anyway.
We'll see how it goes when we get down the track a bit, audio and video processing.
What it is doing is settling down my mind considerably. That creaking on XP install had me nervous about another hangup all the time.
I began to shun the machine.
Nice to be back on it. It has a good monitor and keyboard.
Nice to be back with Linux again, too, after 20 years. Not that you'd know it nowadays with the GUI, looks just like Windows. But I guess the underlying C will begin to manifest as I go further....
I look forward to it...
I am with Corona688 here.
I have messed with Linux since YGGDRASIL Fall '95 edition and tried out many until I hit Debian. This was the single most stable platform I have ever had. I could not make it crash and I hammer the hardware hard.
A close second was PCLinuxOS which was more user friendly.
I run Mint 17 at the moment but my other laptop is going to have the current Debian on it.
As for a development tool they all have gcc as a _builtin_ along with many other installed or ready to be DLed from the repositories.
Audacity is a standard install too.
There are small footprint Linux flavours, just do a Google...
Hope this helps...