It’s been several months since I switched to Linux mint and it’s been great so far. My biggest headache has been dealing with Linux audio and trying to use JACK. I have an electronic drum kit and I use Reaper for recording and using VSTs with yabridge. I managed to get this to work but it only works with ALSA. I want to have YouTube open and play along to songs and this does not work with ALSA. I’ve researched and experimented with JACK for way longer than I cared to. When I switch to JACK, reaper doesn’t recognize my e kit, even tho ita connected with patchbay, and it also makes my default audio output a dummy output. I’ve gotten to the point of just going back to windows cuz this has been a nightmare. Pulse audio does what I want but the latency is too high.
Is getting a second drive with windows on it the best solution?
EDIT: I have made some progress, I switched to bitwig, uses pipewire, mapped my pads to midi notes and assigned them sounds. I got the latency good and I’m able to play with YouTube. The only problem is bitwig doesn’t recognize all the zones in my cymbals. I’m not sure how to fix that, when I was using Steven slate in reaper it registered all the zones.
After fighting my Linux gaming rig for months to get it to record my hardware synthesizers’ audio and MIDI properly, I gave up and dropped $600 on an M4 Mac Mini. Shit just works and now I also have VSTs working perfectly.
I felt dirty in the Apple store buying it and a little gross setting it up, but the results are exactly what I wanted and I can spend my time making music instead of reading man pages for utilities that work within the framework that supports the tools I use to make music.