I'm on Arch, btw (read: I'm torching Windows)
And it took forever to do.
Back in April I had a good amount of free time on my hands so I decided to start up a home server on a spare mini PC running CasaOS over Ubuntu. That went pretty well.
Then I read an article that said that Microsoft Copilot takes a screenshot every few seconds (on mobile) for the sake of training AI.
Although I didn't see that this explicitly extends to PCs (and later read that it would), it was enough to deter me from using Windows as my main OS on my main desktop. I had already been thinking about switching anyway since Windows 11 isn't compatible with my hardware that's still decent. It became a bit of a joke to me at that point.
Distro Hopping
I'm gonna make this a list so that this section doesn't get overwhelmingly long-winded:
I started with MX Linux
My Digitakt worked as an audio device in the live USB, broke when I installed the OS
Wiped and installed Endeavour (also broken), Archcraft (broken)
Bought a new audio interface, worked like a charm! A massive thank you to my guy Incentive who tried to help me get my Digitakt working anyway
Archcraft smears one of my displays and I can't seem to resolve it, Bitwig won't properly install
Wiped, installed NixOS and was happy. Found out Wine, yabridge, and carla won't properly open my VSTs in Bitwig
Wiped and installed Garuda Hyprland, Bitwig won't load my VSTs (Linux) or record audio (Wine) but a different DAW seems to be the closest to perfect I'll get
Switching DAWs
I've finally broken down and decided I'm switching to Renoise. If there's a running theme from the past couple months it's that permanence has gone out the window, so I'm just gonna roll with it the changes.
The most surprising thing for me is that my latency is near non-existent when recording audio/MIDI. Not only that, but it sounds so much more clear (part of me thinks this was due to my Windows sample rate, another thinks it's just cognitive bias).
Because I've spent a good 3 weeks straight working on switching over I've started to fall pretty far behind on some projects I've been working on.
Its been long enough of everything working reliably, all of my other services like rslsync and rclone are working well in an automated fashion, and I think the only thing I haven't tested is my games which aren't that important right now.
Back to the music.