Yeah, I’m pretty sure the sound driver thing has been sorted since pipewire came out, it acts as a sort of bridge between the different sound servers. As far as your plugins, I found two posts from the old place about it: here and here, I wouldn’t know specifically on those since I mostly use the open-source ones in the Arch repos. If neither of those help, you could try yabridge, which would be available from your distro’s package manager.

As far as DAWs, I’m using Ardour, which is completely free, but there’s also a couple of paid ones, REAPER, at $60 for individuals or $225 for a commercial license, and Bitwig, which costs between $100 and $400 depending on which license you buy. Personally, Ardour’s been fine for me.

Low-latency can be achieved a few different ways, Ubuntu has a distro called Ubuntu Studio that uses their own tricks to make it happen, it also comes with a bunch of extra stuff for graphic design and video editing. Personally, I went with Arch, and followed the instructions on the Arch wiki, and I see latencies in the low single digits of milliseconds. There’s also AV Linux and KX Studio , but I haven’t used those, so I couldn’t tell you much about them, other than that I hear good things about them.

That was a longer reply than I had intended, but if you make the switch, good luck and rock on!

I’ve been making an album on Linux, anything I can help with?

Let the bodies hit the floor

Be the reason the Hazmat Compliance team has to get involved

I’m on Ironwolf now

Edit: It’s Ironfox, I got that and Librewolf confused in my brain thingy

You’re naming them out of the stuff that specifically isn’t space!

I have it alised to orphankiller

Interesting, I’ll keep that in mind for if I go for a RAID setup, but for now it’s just my one drive on BTRFS, the other one is ext4.

Arch isn’t unstable, I just keep breaking things in my ignorance. The only thing in this scenario I could pin on Arch is that the “ca-certificates” package should have been marked as a dependency for pacman, but I guess it’s not strictly a dependency, as you can use pacman to install stuff from a local repo. Definitely for Firefox, though, as you can not browse the internet without the certs.

Could be, seems to me that BTRFS didn’t match the subvolid between @home and what it expected @home to be in the fstab, but I won’t claim to be an expert lol

Yeah, I could see it being a good server OS, but otherwise NixOS seems like it’s on the “immutable” thing that’s popular right now. I’ve tried a few immutable distros, and they’re not for me, I end up layering everything anyways lol

Idk about all that, it’s been fine for me, just a little misconfiguration here. The compression just saved me a bunch of storage space, so I’m kinda in btrfs’ corner right now lol

LMAO I was unaware of this! That’s hilarious!

I like to tinker, plus I can be absolutely assured that every problem with my system is 100% my fault, which actually makes it easier to track down any problems. But the main reasons people use Arch is probably the rolling release model and the AUR.

Bleachbit

Just an update: following the very helpful suggestions in this thread has gotten my drive usage down to 16%! Super happy about that, y’all rock!

You joke, but I actually did remove locales with BleachBit, and then changed pacman.conf to skip the unnecessary ones. Saved me about 400MB!

Yeah, that’s pretty much how I solve all my problems lol

That’s the second recommendation for qdirstat, so it’s definitely on the tomorrow list!