@Martijn de Haas That's all really good info for me to consider. I can only have one main computer, and it has to do other things than just music production unfortunately, and I just flat out do not want the rubbish that win 11 contains!! I have gotta keep it on my sound engineering computer which is bad enough in itself 🤣 My plan is to have Linux on one HD, and Win 10 on another. I am gonna experiment with production on Linux and see if I can make it work, whilst still having the win 10 as a backup. If I can get the fabfilter and valhalla stuff to work, I am pretty sure that is enough with Bitwig, Tal , Uhe, and The Usual Suspects nplugins all being supported. I get choice paralysis really easily, which is one of the reasons why I like hardware. So a limited set of plugins is actually possibly a bonus.

@Rich Rath Thank you so much- that is all beyond useful. I did not realise how powerful all the Jack/Pipewire stuff has the potential to be, wow. Like I said in another post I am going to run Win 10 and Linux on two different HD's whilst I get used to Linux. I don't know if I will ever fully switch over, but it's actually quite fun to be learning something other than Windows

@Owen Palmer Yeah their headphones are shit imo. Their speaker design was decent years ago tho. I am pretty sure the owner tanked their reputation and they stopped doing them. The mid-tops work on the "infinite baffle" school of thinking, and for certain genres they do sound really good (think dnb/psy-trance), wouldn't wanna use it for like country music, acoustic guitars etc. They are incredibly loud for their size, when you compare them to say Function One

@Guido De Filippo Santos They can definitely blow up, I have sent one back twice (somebody fucking around with a speakon caused a short, and the other was massive voltage spikes from a genny). But they have like a max repair charge of £200 out of warrantee, which is nice. The software has got a loads better with the last update, I just wish there was a manual for it tbh... But they sound awesome, the limiters are transparent AF, you can lock the amps. The front panel controls are good. I feel comfortable just setting them up and then walking away, even if the rig is being pushed

You can get different "flavours" depending on what you are clipping for sure tho. An ms-20 sounds amazing on high freq drums, a midas desk sounds different.

@Henrik Boe I did not know that about the eq, it's really good to find that out!

Trance-tastic :)