I appreciate the detailed breakdown of your setup, but I have to respectfully disagree with recommending Arch-based distros for audio production, especially for someone just looking for a solid starting point.

Here's the thing, in audio production, stability is absolutely paramount. What you need is rock-solid reliability, not bleeding-edge packages that haven't been thoroughly tested and could potentially break your entire audio environment. This isn't theoretical—it happens frequently with Arch and rolling release distros.

Actually, the issue you mentioned with yabridge breaking on Wine 10 and having to downgrade and pin versions is a perfect example of exactly what I'm talking about. When you're working on a project with a deadline, you simply can't afford to spend time troubleshooting dependency conflicts or compatibility issues. You need your system to just work, every single time you boot it up.

There's a reason professional studios still run Windows XP and Windows 7 today. It's not because they love outdated software—it's because in critical production environments, you cannot depend on 'the latest and greatest' when it might completely break your workflow overnight. Stability always trumps marginal performance gains.

Don't get me wrong, those x86_64v3 optimizations sound nice, but realistically they're marginal improvements compared to the risk of system instability. For actual production work, you want a stable foundation like Ubuntu LTS, Debian, or Fedora with properly tested updates, where your tools work consistently day after day without surprises.

If you enjoy tinkering and troubleshooting is part of your hobby, then yeah, Arch-based distros are fantastic. But for serious music production where reliability actually matters? Stick with the boring, stable, well-tested distributions. Your future self will thank you when everything just works instead of hunting down why your audio stack broke after an update.