You're not wrong, and I suspect it has something to do with hardware. My Behringer U-Phoria worked fine on Linux, then my Scarlett shit itself, then I replaced

You're not wrong, and I suspect it has something to do with hardware. My Behringer U-Phoria worked fine on Linux, then my Scarlett shit itself, then I replaced it with a MOTU M2 which does just fine. If you interface isn't USB-class-compliant, don't expect it to work on Linux. > By definition neither Jack nor Pipewire can be faster than the ALSA they are talking to. Sure, but that's like saying that you don't need an operating system when you can compile to baremetal. Both Jack and Pipewire are slower, but offer pretty substantial routing options on top of that. Furthermore, I believe both protocols support ALSA connections too. I use Bitwig on NixOS and it's not too bad with PipeWire. Latency and routability generally rivals CoreAudio, which is good enough for me.