..have you tried ardour in linux ? it looks very nice plus plug in support.
looks like its come a long way. i'm impressed.
Ardour and I believe Audacity came from Linux-based projects and have over time migrated to the other platforms.
Ardour is the DAW on which Harrison Consoles base their Mixbus and Mixbus32, and Harrison have long been major contributors to Ardour's progress. I used Ardour at the start, but now mostly use Reaper or Mixbus, sometimes my Ui24R hardware mixer. Ardour is very popular, both with the free-software guys and those that are comfortable with paying. I'm in the latter group. I'll often make donations for the free stuff, too.
…this week ive been checking out mini pc's that run both win and linux
A client of my R&D work has been using the base "LattePanda V1" for a year or so now. They used to use a PC104 board and Win95-embedded, but are now moving Win10
https://www.lattepanda.com/..oops forgot to ask , can one use the ultrapak shipped drive work over usb without install on the internal drive ?
There's an important qualifier that I may well have failed to mention: Because of the lack of a working Windows Media Player, running on Linux requires all the RealTracks to be
WAV files. That means that the Audiophile edition should probably run OK from the USB drive, but a non-audiophile edition needs the .WMA files expanded to .WAV, and they'll end up as around 1.7TB of data. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't run on a 2TB USB drive. IIRC I did that for a while before deciding to get an extra SATA drive for BiaB, which drive I formatted to NTFS so that both Linux and Windows can use it. Linux is fine with NTFS, but Windows doesn't understand ext4, which is the usual disc format for Linux.
I have found that rebuilding the databases in Wine+Linux causes the Win10 copy to ask for a rebuild and vice versa. I'm not sure why ... some file age test somewhere, I guess. I imagine the same would happen if one used a dual-boot Win10 and Win11 machine. If it's a file thing, I can 'touch' the date; if it's Windows registry, I'll leave well alone.