This might sound a little crazy, but I'm sure some people here on LinuxMusicians have done it before. In fact, I feel like it's much more of a musician thing than a computer geek thing to do: I'd like my DAW to interact with plug-ins which are running on separate machines, simply. I've done this back in my old Windows days, but that was a long time ago, and I never intended to do it again up until now. But now I am on Linux, and NetVST seems to be discontinued. (Correct me if I'm wrong about this claim, but anyway I don't even think they had a version for Linux.)
Here's what I had managed to do with NetVST (and I recall it being fairly easy, although I can't remember the actual process much at all): The DAW was running on one Windows PC and NetVST was running on another. One was a desktop computer which ran the DAW, the other a more powerful laptop which ran NetVST. I believe I had connected them together physically using an Ethernet cable, and this is what was being used to pass the MIDI data from the DAW to the NetVST host, and the audio back from the NetVST host to the DAW. I also recall being stupid at that point in my life, so perhaps this process could be even easier now that I know a bit more about computing. (Long live GNU/Linux.)
Can a similar setup be achieved with Carla and/or libre alternatives? What are the limitations? I've never used Carla before, and the situation described above has generated my first interest in the software. However I have not found any evidence of people using Carla to achieve such results.
God bless.