If you use Linux to edit audio, mix songs and work with audio in general, including having trouble making certain audio hardware work, it’s your chance to join a community effort to make Linux audio creation better and more accesible.
The Audio Creation SIG (Special Interest Group) is a hub for creators to help each other create and together try and find ways to get better hardware and VST support for Linux.
Personal anecdote: I connected my guitar to my shitty sound card a few weeks ago, ran guitarix (because real DAWs are overwhelmingly complicated and I just want an amp, a compressor, and some reverb), and thanks to PipeWire and pipewire-jack everything ran perfectly. Low latency, no crackling, no messing with jackd or ALSA, no restarting audio daemons, I could simultaneously play audio through Firefox and hear my guitar. I dare say that that part of the audio stack is now a solved problem.
I’m not a musician though so I can’t comment on hardware support for exotic sound/midi cards or the maturity of FOSS DAWs.
You didn’t have to tweak PIPEWIRE_LATENCY or adjust the latency in guitarix? In my setup the latency isn’t great out of the box.
Right, I did do that. Even without it the latency is noticeable but not catastrophic IMO.
Personally, I use Bitwig studio. It’s. It not Foss, but it’s well build, not as expensive as others, and it fulfils the “no Tux no Bux” requirement.
I didn’t know about the existence of guitarix, thanks
As far as exotic stuff goes, I only buy stuff that’s class-compliant so I don’t have to worry about the manufacturer sunsetting support in the future. Supporting those sorts of devices should be a priority over anything with weird proprietary issues (fuck you IK Multimedia!).