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.

Can you share how you did this? Did you have to seat beacondb as your location services in iode or in the app itself?

My experience is that Zood cnnot find me unless I’m using default (google) location services, and I haven’t been able to find a workaround for my set up

I had great success with Zood on stock android but no luck on Graphene using non - google location services. I’ve reached out to the Dev for integration with OSM and/or beacondb support with no response.

If anyone has Zood running on Graphene without switching to google location services let me know I’d love to use it

Osmand+ is definitely the right answer for customizability and power; however CoMaps has made the GUI decisions for you in a nice way and is ready to go out of the box.

Osmand+ added secure location sharing to their roadmap for 2026 which is something my family really misses - so I will he using and supporting when that drops.

Laslty, open street maps have one fatal choke point - search is pretty terrible. Even inputting a correctly formatted address often yields no results or too many confusing results. Searching by place name is hit or miss, mostly miss. The only workaround is to verify address and get lat long coordinates for that address- I typically do this from a third party website.

All Geckos can sync if Mozilla Sync is enabled with an account. So you can sync say LibreWokf or WarwrFox on desktop to any mobile version, such as IronFoz. They do not have to “match”.

After flitting around to different ESS readers ive settled on NewsBlur. I really really like it - the free version is fully functional, but the paid has awesome quality of life features.

Available in browser and from F-Droid

As someone who heavily uses Bandcamp both as an artist and a fan, I am still dedicated to the platform. However there has been a decent amount of enshittification recently - now they are pushing artists to switch from PayPal (bad) to Stripe (worse) for artist payouts.

Why is Stripe worse you ask? Well the first thing they ask you to do is give them full access to your online banking through your primary bank when you set up an account.

Grapheme is smooth as can be for me and great for multitasking

I personally found it very easy to install Graphene and get it up and running.

Same! I have a few of my very early very primitive tracks in Buzz.

Jeskola briefly revived it so if you’re wanting to return to trackers could be worth a look. Renoise is still hyped (haven’t tried it) as is the hardware Polyend Tracker (also haven’t tried it).

I’m more of a (virtual) modular than a tracker mindset these days so a combo of FL, Bitwig, Reaktor, Plugdata etc to make a fusion of industrial and idm–

https://sunthief.bandcamp.com/album/thy-neighbors-looking-glass

Jeskola Buzz Tracker. Making tracks in a vertical midi step sequencer with no mixer was wild AF.

IIRC it came with an awesome drum kit called PSI Drums and a set of proprietary plugins (non VST) which included several cool synths abd Whitenoise Stereodist - the most brutal distortion I’ve ever heard, surpassing Ohmicide, Coldfire and Rift in its ability to turn things into aggressive digital terrain.

Migrated to Fruity Loops pretty soon thereafter

Very much in the AI skeptical and even anti-AI crowd. I appreciate the attempt and it does feel aligned with Proton’s overall direction / mission.

I just tries it in a web browser and it was 0/2 of the first two questions I asked it.

It is really exhausting and annoying to have assistants baked into everything now just so “ready to help”.

Will probably check back in a year and see if this still exists and if it is has improved. In the meantime I’m doing just fine without any AI whatsoever

From an outsiders perspective, element has never worked for me and never been stable enough to get anywhere close to discord. Joining servers is buggy AF and Element X is severely hobbied on mobile.

I’ve been refusing to use discord for about 6-8 months and am often invites to join various discords by IRL friends and online communities. I wish Matrix / Element was a viable alternative but I’ve never been able to get it working for anythung other than DMs, and I’m already happy with Signal for that honestly.

As a non developer I want to be sensitive to the amount of work involves, and the number of cooks in the kitchen, but the fact that we don’t have a FOSS- federated slack / discord killer app is leaving so much interaction on the table.

I’ve heard of Revolt but it doesn’t seem to be there with encryption

Ehhhh do you have more evidence than a couple policy-specific / sycophantic tweets? I’m not sure I’d personally describe it that way