What you really need is one of native DAWs you mentioned combined with Windows VST plugins run using Yabridge + WINE.

I remember running even complex VSTs along with realtime MIDI processing from e-drums with really good results and low latency.

1. Make sure your distro runs Pipewire and has pipewire-jack installed. Run your DAWs with JACK backend

2. You can check https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio for tips regarding audio performance. Don’t worry if you don’t use Arch-based distro. Most of it applies to any distro really

3. Install wine and yabridge follow setup instructions on how sync your plugins, which essentially takes specified locations with VST2/VST3 DLLs and creates .so equivalents (Linux dll format) under specified location that under the hood calls Wine, but makes it transparent. You add that location (with .so files) in your DAWs search paths and it should scan those plugins like if they were native.

Of course some compatibility issues are possible, but you should be able to run most stuff this way when it comes to plugins.

Hello

You completely forgot to mention it runs Arch

Naaah, bootable USB stick is enough xD

Thank you very much Tim Apple

You don’t need to. Modem browsers will suspend unused tabs, cache them on drive and free up the memory, while quickly restoring as soon user activate them. On at least moderately fast systems this happens so quickly it’s hardly noticeable.

Thanks for nothing Microsoft

It really depends on how the distro you’re using is integrating them and while installing them is usually the easy part, working around certain quirks they come with can be a bit tedious in my experience.

The proprietary driver comes in binary form and is shipped with a small kernel module that handles loading the binary driver. The Linux kernel modules that aren’t part of Linux itself (which most drivers are) must be compiled for specific kernel and its binary can work only for that specific kernel and nothing else. This means that even if then driver is the same but kernel changes, the nvidia module must still be recompiled. There are two ways distros handle that: 1) by running the compilation process in the background while installing or updating the driver package 2) by shipping binary form of the nvidia module, in case where it’s distro that always recommends synchronization of all packages so that kernel and modules always match. Historically this caused way more problems than it sounds, compilation might have failed for certain kernels occasionally leaving users with broken video after simple system update. Overall though it mostly works fine, especially nowadays.

Another quirk is that the user-space part of the driver that exposes OpenGL and Vulkan interfaces for applications are also proprietary and closed source, and they must also match exactly with the kernel part of the driver. This creates another problem for sandboxed applications using for instance Flatpak. Applications in container won’t use the system-wide libraries, but rather ship their own - and that’s by design for good reasons. Flatpak will automatically detect NVIDIA and install matching driver just fine, but then after installing system upades, you must always update your flatpaks as well or the ones that use GPU in any way will simply fail to launch or fall back to software rendering making it extremely slow. This doesn’t happen for open source drivers, because Mesa can work with basically any kernel, so Mesa in Flatpak can be in completely different version than the one installed as system package. Moreover, I experienced problems with storage space because Flatpak wouldn’t automatically remove old NVIDIA drivers and after a year or so it was a chunky pile of NVIDIA drivers.

And even when it works, there can still be missing functionality or integration with the OS might not be perfect. Last time I used them I was limited to X11 with many quirks regarding multi monitor setup and vertical synchronization. Wayland is technically usable now on NVIDIA, but not perfected yet.

Is that juice brand actually something available in Toronto area? That could tell us more if she’s telling the truth or not

Nice

It literally hasn’t changed even a tiny bit since I first saw it in 2006 :)

I currently use Strawberry - a well maintained fork of the old Amarok player before they redone the UI for KDE 4. It does what I care the most:

• Tree view collection with artist -> album grouping
• Files view
• Lyrics
• Tag editor
• Queue
• Last, but definitely not least - gapless playback

It’s Windows 95

The guy himself, a communist legend

Because it was. Only very late right before the project was killed they renamed it

It actually was merged just few days ago, I mean the color management protocol

You have to decide whether you want to be Linux app or GNOME app

On 6 you can have similar experience to Latte with just the panel minus the animations and some of its customizations

Tweaks and preconfigured distros aren’t solution here. The driver is still lacking certain features and that can only be fixed by NVIDIA

I love how pacman/libalpm database is just directories with tiny little files, and it’s faster in resolving dependencies than mostly anything else

Now that you can get latest software from Flathub, there’s really nothing wrong with Debian “stable” except for more recent hardware support that requires newer kernel at the very least (recent userspace drivers will also come from Flatpak if the software like Steam is also a Flatpak). That is, if the stable repo has all you need and there’s no reason to supplement it with external packages.

There are however perfectly valid reasons for going with rolling to get recent improvements, which I for one care about. For example, now that PipeWire is pretty mature, Debian 13 will ship good version and it will serve well for the next 2-3 years, but some 2 years ago it was really important to get the latest and greatest to have good experience - and even early it was better than PulseAudio would ever be, just still improving rapidly, not ready for full freeze. Other example - KDE Plasma improved significantly from version 6.0 onwards introducing long awaited functionality like fractional scaling, HDR, but also improved stability and general polish. It will only be introduced in Debian 13, one full year after it was introduced.

Lastly, there’s nothing wrong with rolling and it isn’t really “unstable”. Using Arch full time for the last 12 years, I only had like 2-3 situations when update actually broke something and it wasn’t my misconfiguration or a skill issue. Even then it could easily be avoided by using linux-lts kernel. In fact my Debian/Ubuntu installs were much less stable as there was always something missing that I needed (in era before Flatpaks or AppImages especially) relying on 3rd party apt repos, causing breakages and conflicts. I would usually upgrade Debian to testing or unstable anyway, so rolling, but one that’s actually open for breakage.