It is free, after all, and yet out of the box comes replete with tons of stuff that you'd have to spend, literally, a week getting installed on MacOS/Windows, dealing with licenses, etc.
Zynthian: The latency is really not noticeable - I have a 12 track multi-timbral project running on it right now, it sounds just as rock solid and tight as the 3 rows of 19" rack synths/effects and the half-a-room full of other hardware synths in my studio. It is an extremely capable little box, and its built around existing Linux audio technology - so the point is, it serves as a pretty good reference for how good things can get. Jitter? Haven't noticed it.
Zynthian integrates with all the DAW's in my studio, including UA and MacOS systems, just fine. Its a dream to be able to set it up for remote control over rtpMIDI, for example, and not have to run any cables.
Github issues are a professional way to interact with developers. If I had 2c for every time I heard someone complain about the support they -didn't- receive from Apple because of bugs in Logic, or crashes that Steinberg/Yamaha refuse to fix, or updates to Ableton Live that resulted in unusable projects .. I'd have enough to afford a decent UAD system .. ;)
On the other hand, if you look at the closed issues in the Zynthian github, you'll see so many successful contributions from around the world, making the Zynthian a better product. This is the future.
zynthian has a nice website. it seems like a cool idea and I'm sure it has some great use cases. it's still a kit which strikes me as not pro-level.
more concerning is that it appears to have what I would call completely unusable issues regarding latency and jitter (5-20ms of latency is unusable for realtime audio), can you comment on this? how about jitter? what is your experience with it (and if you have any, what are your use cases?)
searching the internet for solutions here seems to show a lot of unresolved issues. I see the developers asking users to file GitHub issues as recently as a couple of months ago. I know very few audio professionals who are going to want to use something with this degree of maintenance / instability / unreliability.
how would you describe the ease with which you can interface the tools you describe with outboard gear using USB or MIDI e.g. audio interfaces, mixers, synthesizers, etc, compared to the apple ecosystem? which tends to be quite plug & play. one reason why it is so widely used.