I have to admit, when it comes to new developments in the Linux world, I tend to live under a rock … never switched to Wayland, not because I have any ideological reservations, but because my favorite WM (a minimalist WM developed by a friend of mine) is available only for Xorg.
I had heard about NixOS before, but until I stumbled upon this thread, I didn’t have a good understanding about what an atomic distro is. Now that I have a bit of an understanding, I guess I can only repeat what others said before, it seems to be solving a problem that I don’t have. I’ve been using rolling release distros for a very long time (at first Gentoo, like, 15 or more years ago, but Arch (btw) for over a decade now, with occasional, typically short stints in Debian-based distros), and the amount of problems caused by updates has been negligible for the last decade (Gentoo overlays 15 years ago could be a pain, for sure).
It does sometimes bother me that my OS config seems to so … static these days, but then again I have so many things going on in life on that I don’t feel a huge need to prioritize changing an OS that feels blazingly fast to use, stable, minimalist, and basically checks all the boxes. It just became my high-productivity comfort zone.
Heh I was about to post the exact opposite … now, it’s true that if you want to use certain DAWs and plugins, they’re not available on Linux … but with Ardour, Reaper or Bitwig you still have some very amazing DAWs at your disposal and there are many great plugins available.
Other than that I frequently perform as a laptop musician on stage (with my own software) and I wouldn’t want to use anything but Linux anymore. Pipewire + a class-compliant Interface, esp. on Arch (btw), seems to be the most rock-solid combination I know of …
Drivers on Windows seem to be so consumer-oriented that they try to do all kinds of stuff for you and I wouldn’t trust it at all in a live situation … everything seems to be way to fragile. MacOS is stable but I find the configurability is lacking behind.
When it comes to multichannel audio, I don’t think anything can beat Pipewire or JACK … free system-level anywhere-to-anywhere routing is so much better than the whole aggregate device + blackhole dance you have to do on MacOS … it’s super inconvenient if you ask me (and I’ve been developing multichannel audio software for a living for some time).
So, yeah … It all depends on your needs but for me, as someone who develops audio software both professionally and for their own music practice, and performs frequently, I’d say it’s the other way 'round … Linux, in 2026, blows everything out of the water audio-wise …