I started this thread being basically an Ubuntu user (Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mint, you name it). The fact is that, after all this time, I switched to a combination of
Manjaro,
Yabridge as a Windows VST bridge, and a fork of Wine called
Wine TKG (
https://github.com/Frogging-Family/w...g-git/releases), all of which has allowed me to use, for example, Kontakt and other heavy stuff in Linux in a similar way to Windows (with an expected but rather small and absolutely negotiable dose of overhead). I give this as an example of a task which takes realtime audio in Linux to its limits.
Robbert-vdh (the developer of Yabridge) has given me an absolutely priceless feedback. As he has kindly pointed out to me during my transition, the main bottlenecks regarding such an intensive task as bridging Windows plugins in Linux lay both in the kernel used by Ubuntu and many other distros, together with some inherent lacks in the Wine department, solved by Wine TKG, Wine-Nspa and possibly other forks. I'm talking here about bridging Windows plugins, but take into account that this also affects realtime audio in general. And what's even more bizarre is that,
at least in Manjaro, most of the suggested audio tweaks that dozens of threads/sites recommend here and there, in fact seem to hurt the performance notably, as I could test out myself. All I have needed in Manjaro is to do three things :
1 - Add my user to the audio group
sudo gpasswd -a user group
(Replace "user" by your username and "group" by audio).
2 - Set the CPU governor to performance
[EDIT] The following procedure hasn't given me a 100% reliable solution in my machines. Hence I downloaded an app from Manjaro's package manager called cpupower-gui which allows me to set, with great detail and in a visual manner, the speed and governor of each CPU core. Up to this date (April 11th), it still has a bug where it won't load a custom profile on log in -if you don't want to set the desired profile each time -, but anyway it's a great little tool that allows you to check easily the real CPU speed of your machine. Other people use TLP, a similar but more complex app, to achieve similar things.
I'll leave the - supposedly - basic procedure, just in case you want to try it out. I suggest downloading cpupower-gui, anyway, and checking out that the desired result is really achieved :
Download with the Add/Remove software a tool called cpupower
Then, in /etc/default/cpupower, do the following :
Uncomment
#governor='ondemand'
and change it to
governor='performance'
Then, in the terminal
sudo systemctl enable --now cpupower
3- Install Wine-TKG (with just a double-click in the downloaded file) and enable this variable in /home/user/.profile for Wine TKG to perform its magic :
export WINEFSYNC=1
That's all in my case. As I said before,
when I added the tweaks usually recommended elsewhere, things got notably worse. Your mileage might vary drastically, of course, but Manjaro at least seems to need very few tweaks to perform great.
So, everything you will read from me below, before January 2021, is not valid anymore (in fact, you will notice it refers to other distros). This first post condenses my most valuable finds since I started with Linux.