I think the main benefit of using mainline Arch is that you can use the Wiki and know that its information will apply precisely to your system… I’d always be a bit unsure whether the derivates would have tweaked my system the same way.
I’ve been trying to install manjaro and found several issues on my dual boot old machine, GRUB does not work… it seems that intel requires the payment of a license to set UEFI properly, which canonical pays for and arch doesnt. I am still searching for solution and will have a look at IRC.
What can be considered the most audio friendly arch distro (or is there such a thing) ? Manjaro, Endeavour, Garuda ? Any recommendation focused on SuperCollider usage ?
Hm, EFI is largely black magic to me as well, but anecdotally speaking I have vanilla Arch running on three machines (two thinkpads – one Intel and one AMD – and an ancient mac mini) and some rpis running Arch ARM with a realtime kernel and have never had any problem booting with efistub (that is, once I got the initial boot entries worked out for each machine, which can admittedly be frustrating). They’ve all been just fine for working with SC as well, though obviously (Arch being Arch) you need to know exactly how you want them set up since nothing is configured for you out of the box.
I have been using EndeavourOS as a quick and easy Arch installer lately. I gotta say that it surprised me a lot. It takes away a lot of the hassle while still providing a very minimal but functional experience. I would definitely reccommend it!
Endeavour looks awesome. Garuda also seems really cool - I know they do things to increase performance but the steps needed to make any arch system a high performance audio system are pretty few these days anyway. It’s just important IMO to choose a desktop environment that doesn’t waste too many resources on animations and blabla (eg avoid Gnome). Things like Sway, I3, BSPWM, XFCE are really minimalistic on resource usage.
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With Endeavour you can set up a lightweight and functioning audio system really quick - I did it recently and it took about half an hour to have it up and running, with Jack and SuperCollider etc. working and all. Garuda seems a little bloated and flashy for my taste, but it’s probably quite good too.
Is this package group still available ?
I am geting:
-> Could not find all required packages:
supercollider-plugins (Target)
No, sorry - my mistake. That feature apparantly doesn’t work in the AUR, only in the grown up section of Arch Linux.
But I think you could install all of them using a wild card such as yay -S supercollider-* (or using paru with the same command)
I used a machine with archlinux for years; it was the best performance (even compared to many newer Macbooks). My system was basically xmonad, linux-rt, jack2 and sc. Beautiful.
It was during a previous version of aur, at the time I wrote many of the audio packages there. I don’t know if some of those PKGBUILDs survived.
I’m feeling a bit nostalgic now, thinking about going back )))
Now everything ships with pipewire, and I’m not sure it’s ready for serious low-latency work.
Do you still need linux-rt for low latencies? Have you done some rt tests to compare?
thanks for the creds. and thanks to @madskjeldgaard for pointing at improvments (in the slow pipeline)
Pipewire and vanilla kernel works even better than my previous setup of linux-rt-lts and jack, so I’d say it’s more than ready!
512 samples buffersixe->128 
Plus pipewire is much easier to deal with in terms of using multiple soundcards, Bluetooth, etc.
@kflak, where to look for quick rerouting pipewire connections? For example, I have more soundcards, when I boot the scsynth, it makes some default connection to my internal soundcard in laptop, ok. everything is fine, until I want to use different output device, I am always doing it manually. Do you happen to know where to look for? thanx
You can do it in pavucontrol. Just click on the checkmark icon next to the soundcard in the output and input tabs.
I am not aware of any way to hotswap soundcards while supercollider is booted. You still need to reboot scsynth if you want to use the new card, alternatively reroute manually in qjackcontrol or similar software.
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Added supercollider-f0plugins-git to aur
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/supercollider-f0plugins-git
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