swab148

Honestly, you've kinda already found one of the best, here on Lemmy! Other than that, depending on which distro you choose, the Arch community can be a little terse, but definitely the most knowledgeable and more than willing to help if you do your research first. The Mint community is pretty nice, and patient since the distro is aimed at newbies. LinuxMusicians is a nice forum, and not so distro-specific, but I've noticed that they tend to get bogged down in the "why" and not the "how" on occasion. Really, other than Phoronix and the LKML, the Linux community in general is pretty cool, just a few loud voices give us a bad rap for being too insular, but that's changing pretty quickly.

Anytime! One of the best things about Linux is that if you're having trouble, you can ask the community for help and more than likely, someone's gonna know something about it, so help is just a post away! Have fun, and good luck!

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

No problem! It's worth noting that both of those non-FOSS plugins I mentioned are both free as in "free beer", so if you need a good auto tune and/or fancy chorus, check those out!

Awesome, thanks for the advice! And I will for sure let you know when I upload it somewhere, but I can tell you the tools I use right now! I've got Ardour for my DAW, I'm using a mix of the Ardour community plugins, LSP parametric equalizer, Calf compressor, and the two non-FOSS ones are Graillon 3 auto tune and Acon Digital Multiply. Drums are via Hydrogen, with the Ian Paice and Travis Barker drumkits from sourceforge, and I think I yanked Dave Grohl's toms for one song. Some other various drum effects I got off of Pixabay. The main album art is going to be handmade because I suck at GIMP, but if I get enough support to make like, a vinyl pressing or something, then I'll include all my failed attempts at album art in the liner notes lol

Yeah, I just wanted to hit all the ask communities, get a broad spectrum of answers.

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 just switched to Bitwarden for passwords