Check out the Fedora Atomic distros Silverblue, Kinoite, etc. You can just run arch in a distrobox for your arch needs while keeping a clean and stable core.

In my distrobox bitwig set up with Wine 9.21 I am using the following with no issues

• Melda (various including MSoundFactory)
• Native instruments (including Reaktor and Massive X)
• unfiltered audio / plugin alliance including battalion
• psychic Modulation
• all arturia
• all Valhalla dsp
• Adam Szabo viper and jp6k
• lese smear And a bunch of others with no problems.

Usable with some issues

• Newfangled audio - plugins work and sound great but GUI hangs or is extremely laggy

Not working at all

• some eventide plugins
• all aberrant DSP
• all UVI

This is all under a unified wine prefix - o might try playing with different prefixes for different plugins and see if I can’t fix some of the above or some of the QoL issues

I’ve been fine with proton pass but maybe you’re referring to specific autofill use cases?

My primary use case is for audio production. I love that my DAW is native (Bitwig Studio), it runs like a charm. I ran into a lot of issues implementing it with Wine and yabridge with the flatpak install to still use my windows only plugins (I have a large collection of really cool tools)

After building Bitwig in a distrobox with Wine and yabridge I was successful, almost all of my windows plugins work - some as smoothly as Windows, some with some wrinkles. A few of my favorites just dont work at all unfortunately, and after looking into this, its an issue with JUCE8 and wine - specifically,

full support for Direct2D feature level 1.3 in Wine.

I’m novice level with Linux and pretty advanced in Audio production, I’m hoping we can get some folks from the audio world together to contribute to wine to try to make this happen… I want me Aberrant DSP and Eventide plugins working properly!

Thankfully, many whose GUIs are broken can still be somewhat utilized due to Bitwig exposing plugin parameters in their own wrapper - I can tweak from there, but it’s not ideal.

I’ll continue to pressure developers to offer Linux native support as well, but so far its mostly crickets with a few noticing an uptick in requests and considering adding it…

I’m on Kinoite for a host of reasons but one reason I chose an atomic distros was isolation / containerizatoon. I’ll take a look at what secure blue adds and see if I can manually implement any of that in Kinoite

Not at all for me, but my primary use case is audio production. Everything recognized and sync’d on first boot - audio interface, controllers, synthesizers etc. No major driver or codec issues at all.

I use Intel Arc for my GPU and it picked that up right away no need to layer any additional packages. Definitely check around if you’re on nvidia I think that’s the bigger codec issue that is solved by ublue distros

I did run into some issues trying to run my DAW as a flatpak and now have it working well in a distrobox, but that’s largely because I am set on still running some windows plugins via Wine and yabridge…

I migrated from W11 to Kinoite and NY workflow is similar - flatpak, distrobox (right now I have Arch and Ubuntu boxes for different programs) and only layer essential system wide packages to the ostree.

Its very stable and I seriously enjoy using it. The *how Linux should be" piece is mostly resolves and enhanced by using distrobox.

KDE plasma is awesome and a great DE for a beginner like me.