just to piggyback off this comment, i recently migrated from using pop!_os to arch (w/ kde plasma) and i absolutely love it.
i couldn’t stand waiting for system74 to get cosmic + new iteration of pop!_os (which also meant i was stuck in a very old vers of pipewire) out the door. i’m very happy i made the jump tho.
Can you recommend a decent Linux Forum for gear compatibility? (reddit?)
This one is a good spot to check. Search the topics, but also, if there is no topic or mention yet, you can always open one.
The reddit linux music community is good too. I dont always find what im looking for with a search, buy whenever ive posted a question somebody has had an answer for me.
any stock install of any linux distro should get you going. it’s pretty trivial now to get a working “music” environment.
Not really, it depends on the specific hardware. Most often I start at the Arch Linux Wiki and I search with my favorite search engine for “gearname linux compatibility” for info. Most USB devices are “class compliant” which means that they don’t need any driver at all.
The trickiest hardware stuff I encountered are hardware synths, audio interfaces and brand new laptops. USB Midi works with almost everything out of the box though.
This I have seen:
Arturia’s Software Centre works OK for me using WINE; their MIDI Control Centre has been all right too, though managing samples in the MicroFreak is a pain - though I suspect that might be the case on Windows too!
I haven’t tested the Korg Kontrol Editor in ages, but it runs at least for me, again with WINE. It seems to connect to my SQ-64, but I can’t yet work out why it won’t see projects as it should.
This is all on Manjaro (so Arch).
Interesting, I should revisit both of them then! My last efforts are ~6 months old with Arturia and 12 months with Korg to be honest. Things change a lot with WINE.
Can confirm the pain.
Usually simple windows only stuff works ok in wine in my experience as well. Case in point, the zoom l6 live track. Class compliant, no need for any special drivers, works pretty well in Linux, except you need the win utility to enter mass storage mode (and a few other settings, but for me those are set and forget) unless you want to remove the as card and connect it directly in Linux.
Arturia is a bit ridiculous in that regard. Their mini fuse line also works pretty ok without drivers, but only after you run the windows utility once! Until then it only reports 2in/2out even for the minfuse 4. That one stumped me for a bit. Also, if you need to tweak the gain values of the inputs/outputs without konbs you also need the win utility, but that one is kind of expected.
I have learned to accept that sometimes the hardware won’t have an easy connection in Linux, but I make a point to try and get stuff that is class compliant and looks like it could work.
The truth is, today, unlike 5 or so years ago, plenty of things just work in the Linux audio world.
I’m now full on Linux for audio and academic computing including office like tasks, and if you asked me 2 or 3 years ago if this was possible, I would have said, probably no.
The cell phone is still from the evil apple empire, and at work, being an app developer I use the two major OSes and don’t see that changing without a job change as well.
My Linux stack is manjaro, with some latency tweaks, nothing radical, I don’t even use a real time kernel and it’s fine. My DAW of choice are Harrison mixbus for audio based things, and bitwig for virtual instruments, MIDI, and weird shit. I keep the extra plugins to an absolute minimum, and most is the daws own stuff. For an extra bit when needed, LSP give that versatility. Virtually instruments are a bunch of stuff from U-He and Vital. For samples and a bit of orchestral flavour, I use soundbox libraries. Super happy so far with the setup.
Edit : I tried the korg editor to use with a key stage and it did not work in Linux. Then I used it in Mac OS and concluded it’s complete shit and barely functional in Mac OS as well. But at least it could see the keyboard in the Mac. Nevertheless korg seems to be a great example of how not to do utility software.
other than overwitch, i’ve been using mioctl to configure my mioxl. also yabridge has been mentioned before, but it works really well as long as you’re using the deb pkg (easy to build for arch via makepkg -si).
not sure if this has been mentioned, but this is a great guide for configuring your audio; much of it is pertinent to any distro: Professional audio - ArchWiki
Renoise is nice until you want to multitask on Linux, just because of how it uses audio (occupies an audio source, which others can’t use). I’m tempted at this rate to grab a Smpltrek or Lo-fi XT in its place. I guess there’s always Soundtrap I can get back to, got some unfinished projects there though I made with a subscription a bit back.
Are you using Pipewire? You should be able to route multiple audio sources if so.
I think so, but I don’t know. System thinks it’s on ALSA or PulseAudio. Someday I might have to retry Renoise on a fresh Linux install or play around with more settings.
What I’m looking for is to be able to have other applications play audio while Renoise is running and using one, but it seems that I might need a mixer or something.
https://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Setting_Up_Audio_Devices
Configuring Linux for Audio in general: Many Linux distributions are, by default, not optimized to the standards required for real-time audio creation in Renoise. So when using either ALSA or JACK with Renoise it is recommended to:
-use a real-time kernel
-configure PAM (/etc/security.conf) to allow Renoise and other applications to create low latency and high priority tasks
Helvum or QPWgraph should let you mix audio streams in ALSA / Pulse with virtual cables.
Trying it, but my audio interface (MiniFuse 2 OTG) just becomes unavailable when I set Renoise to use it via ALSA.
Damn it, I was doing so well avoiding GAS. If anything, I may need a mixer because I might have to use a rather kludge-y workaround for this. If that doesn’t work, then 
.
Do you have an OS that still uses PulseAudio? If you do, that is the first thing I would update or change.
Yeah, I think it might be either from that, or the fact that it might be from this:
https://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Linux_FAQ
Many desktop managers provide an audio manager (ex. aRts on KDE or ESD in GNOME) which often locks the audio resource for its own use (this may happen during and after an application used it for playback). So, to solve the problem try disabling the audio manager and set all your audio application to use ALSA directly, since it’s capable of sharing audio resources.
I’ve tried using Pipewire, likely since I’m using PipeWire-Pulse, that may be a source of my problem. Will give it a try as soon as I can make a back up of my system first.
LinuxDaw lists more than 1000 plugins now. 
You preface the renoise command with the path to pw-jack on the command line or the desktop file and it will work properly with Pipewire, rather than being an exclusive ALSA connection.