Hello everyone, and thank you all for posting comments to the original post by @rockschmidt – I am also working through CachyOS for a primary use case of professional audio development and a secondary use case for Proton Steam games, game audio, and just music. For about a month or two, I was sidetracked by setting up a new studio environment and furniture–there are a lot of wires, and a lot of labels!
I tried CachyOS-KDE Plasma last fall with my first attempt at integrating my 4th gen Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 interface, using early Arch (AUR) drivers based off of early work by Geoffrey Bennet. I have since upgraded to Focusrite Clarett+ 8Pre with Claret+ 8OctoPre, and today’s search indicates that both of these are now improved and working. I’ll take another look.
I started learning about Bitwig DAW last fall, since I have a copy that came with my LinnStrument purchased last summer. I am about to upgrade it to the new Bitwig 6. I haven’t looked at Reaper yet, but I know a few people that love it. I’m also learning how to use my iConnectivity mio XL for MIDI connectivity between my instruments, controllers, and DAW. It is Ethernet network capable, but most of my instruments are legacy MIDI or USB MIDI.
In January I started using Ubuntu Studio LTS (where everything suddenly just worked, including the Focusrite via USB Audio Device Class specification level of functionality, which was integrated nicely into Ubuntu Studio (or something from the flatpak Bitwig shimmed it up). I then tried Kubuntu LTS with all of the studio stuff hand installed, + low-latency kernel and AI stack. That was a good learning exercise, but the Debian flavor didn’t grab me like Arch, so I broke it by installing CachyOS on the primary i9 CPU TitanRTX workstation.
Currently, I’m trying Cosmic for the first time, with CachyOS. I may do Rust code later, and Cosmic appears to have a nice balance of simplicity and functionality.
I tend to break the audio a lot under Arch: this time it took me about a week, it was working well, testing the Clarett+ audio with the Star Rupture early access on Steam. I think I didn’t follow the guidelines everybody mentioned above. After a few days of updating with pacman -Syu, I saw some issues, and will need to seriously study the pacman logs and review the btrfs rollback steps or take log-based suggestive steps.
1. Now the loading of the Clarett+ device pair stack just cycles on and off in a loop, and it is painful to watch, I always start with the audio level down, so I don’t know if it would be destructively popping.
2. There were a few ALSA or pipewire updates that flashed in a few days ago… I’ll have to grep logs.
2. I turned off the TU102 HD Audio plugin (the integrated high-definition audio controller Turing architecture built into the NVIDIA Titan RTX (No, not again!), which I normally don’t use, since I use the studio monitors with the Focusrite interfaces. I’ll have to inspect if that was changed in anyway.
3. The CPU architecture was upgraded to v4, I may need to back it down to v3. It’s a large-cache i9, so it might be OK.
4. I noticed on Distrowatch today that there is another new CachyOS ISO available, I’ll check that version against the one I downloaded last weekend, but I think this time I will finally roll-up my sleeves and learn how to use chroot, I’m way over due for that knowledge.
5. I’ll need to review my btrfs notes and re-familiarize with snapper.
6. I’ll need to carefully review the comments everybody wrote above, and make sure I follow best known methods. Any suggestions or comments about things I overlooked are welcome.
Thank you.
I want to roll up my sleeves and get to work on making it work CachyOS.(Still might need the LTS kernel or even have a migration path to a immutable build, if I get some serious job work.)