> Also, trying to do music stuff is mostly a nightmare of JACK and Alsa headaches. I can write generative music code in at least two languages, but I just wanna plug my guitar in and record things and use plug-ins without having to recompile shit

This hasn't been a problem in a while. You definitely don't need Jack for recording your guitar into a DAW with a backing track (I have a studio full of synths that I record - 24 tracks in, 24 tracks out, via a class compliant USB audio interface). And as the sibling comment points out, Pipewire makes things better still; you can point your DAW at "ALSA" (really Pipewire under the hood) and also play Youtube vids in a browser at the same time - this was of course possible with Pulseaudio or Jack, but both of them had their own quirks. Pipewire is overall really nice and just works cleanly.

I am really curious what you had to recompile.

For realtime audio, Pipewire basically solves this problem on Linux. It appears as JACK, Pulse and ALSA to client programs and allows seamless interop between all of them. It's slowly landing in mainstream Linux distros as the default audio solution.

This means that without any special setup, both real-time audio software (which uses JACK) and 'normal' software (Pulse, ALSA) can co-operate on a single system with a single digital patchbay between all of them and the system output devices (including Bluetooth audio devices).

I use a pair of BT headphones (paired to 2 devices) and a keyboard. Both have worked without a hitch since day one on Ubuntu Mate. Funny enough, it's the only device I own that will work with my prehistoric HP printer from 2005 without any hacks. Newer versions of Windows don't work with it (I probably need to fish out the CD with the drivers), MacOS never did.

I can echo the HP printer comment, mines a printer/scanner. Every time I print or scan on Ubuntu I'm expecting it to not work, as that was my experience on macOS, but it works flawlessly. On macOS the driver was abandoned 6 OS versions back, and I had to do some pkg command line trickery running as root just to get the thing to install.

Sorry, I just want to get this straight. We're comparing Linux and MacOS, and having to do command line trickery to do something is a knock against MacOS? Really?

I mean if that's a legitimate black mark, that's 1 ding against MacOS and we can bury Linux under a thick pile of back marks.

It does not have to be ancient printer; I present you Samsung SL-M2070W, which HP is still selling under some other designation.

I can print in MacOS, but I cannot scan. It used to work, but color scanning was broken few years ago, and about two years ago b/w scanning was broken too - Preview or Image Capture will just produce something malformed.

There used to be a workaround using Samsung scanning utility, but it doesn't work since Catalina, due to the utility being 32-bit app.

So what I do? RDP into other machine that does not have such problems (either Linux or Windows) and then transfer the scanned file.

So much for "just works".

Does pipewire solve your problems in recording? I'm planning to get into the music making rabbit hole and I wonder if my Pop_OS! laptop is up to the task.

And after all the fiddling, then there is an upgrade and you need to fiddle again.