> 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

> 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.