Greetings and salutations.
My backstory - I am an old school Linux guy from way way back (started in 1995 with Slackware, kernel version 1 dot something or another, which replaced OS/2 as my main OS), and been making my living with it doing servers/network/security/embedded/cloud/etc kinds of stuff almost as long. However, back in the day, there were no viable DAW's for Linux, so I got started with Cakewalk during that era, and ended up sticking with that out of familiarity till my DAW PC died not too long ago. After rebuilding the hardware with a new MB/CPU/RAM, I found out that my old Windows 7 won't run on the new motherboard, and it'll be a cold day in hell when I pay actual money for Win 10 or 11. So.... DAW's have come a long way on Linux, or so I've heard, so figured I'd give it a whirl. Been more work than I had hoped getting myself sorted and comfortable, but I think I'm pretty close to 'there' for what I need/want.
I played with demo's of Tracktion, BitWig, Ardour/MixBus and Reaper, and after a lot of playing around, I ultimately settled on Reaper because of various reasons.
So, with what to use for the DAW sorted out, I've since been going through the exercise of trying out what literally seems like 1,001 plugins and how to use them effectively. Despite the 'meh' UI, I've been surprised how often the native Reaper plugins come out on top for me (though not always).
Anyway, with all that being where I'm at, and me being an old old school forum hanger on since BBS's and FIDOnet were a thing, I wound up here when looking for a form for folks doing the same stuff as I am.
Looking forward to hanging out, asking dumb questions, talking trash (politely), and sharing whatever I know that may be helpful to someone else.
