Libre realtime kernel and ThinkPenguin setups

There is Musix, a fully free distro that is based on Debian and afaik has a realtime kernel. It doesn't get updated too often though.

Dynebolic released a new version 6 months ago. That's your best choice in the libresphere.

You mistakenly wrote "have no non-free drivers". Correct it please.

According to this announcement from DistroWatch, Musix does really have a real-time kernel. The latest development version is 3.0 beta 2 and can be downloaded here.

Ubuntu Studio had in the past a real-time kernel but as of version 10.10 they moved back to the monolithic-one. You can find a good software selection that can be helpful for you on its Wikipedia page here.

I can't edit my original post, but with ATI and Nvidia drivers, doesn't Ubuntu recommend the proprietary "non-free" drivers? Also isn't performance generally better with those?

As for Ubuntu Studio, one of the main reasons for using it was having a realtime kernel in addition to the software selection. Ever since they removed it, it really defeated the purpose of using it since the packages could be installed manually. Was it too hard to maintain or something?

Though the newer Intel graphics chipsets are much more powerful your CPU will be doing the heavy lifting. Contrary to popular belief an advanced graphics card is not required for general video editing as the majority of graphics processing is only 2D. Memory and CPU are the most important. The higher end the CPU the better.

I personally use Parabola GNU/Linux-Libre, and they have a package in their kernel repository for the Linux-Libre kernel with realtime patches, which I also use.

If you're willing to use an Arch-like system, I'd highly recommend it.

I'm a musician and I use Trisquel to record and edit frequently.

Newer kernels are such that they can benefit from real-time processing of audio without the need for kernel patches.

So what I do is use JACK (the easiest way is to install the qjackctl program) and there's an option to enable real-time, which I believe is on by default - when you install it will ask if you give it permission to take up potentially all of your RAM, say yes and save your work often, or, say, don't have 300 tabs open at the same time as you record.

Some software like Ardour requires JACK, while other software like Audacity can be configured to use it.

A lot of (unrelated) software, say certain media players or web plugins doesn't work with JACK, so turn it off if you hear no sound and there's no option to tell it to use JACK.

And when I say "newer" kernels I'm referring relative to when I started using GNU/Linux, so you don't really even have to be bleeding-edge - I'm on the Trisquel LTS which features an oldish kernel.