I think my first piece of advice is that unless you have really simple needs or you enjoy fucking with packages don't choose a rolling release distro like I did lmao roflcopter lol
I picked EndeavorOS which is apparently a good child distro of Arch Linux with a graphical installer and desktop environments and some nice programs. I like the idea of Arch Linux but don't wanna set a bunch of things up and EndeavorOS seems good so far.
Anyway this would have worked if I had simpler needs. The rolling release distro just makes it harder to downgrade to earlier versions but a simpler setup would have been fine with the latest. I did a trial-trial run on a laptop with no audio interface and everything went fine. But on my main PC I have an audio interface and apparently the latest versions of pipewire (an audio driver) are having Issues with audio interfaces with lots of IO.
This was causing audio to break in games, and Monster Hunter World would even fail to fully load in this state.
The other issue was that my gaming setup prefers wine-staging which is a more bleeding edge version of Wine (used to run Windows software) BUT the latest version of wine-staging does not play nice with yabridge, which is used to run Windows plugins for music production.
So the current state is that I can play Steam games using Steam (with Proton) and non-Steam games using Lutris (with wine-ge and wine-staging) and I can run my DAW with Windows plugins using wine-staging and yabridge. I have downgraded wine-staging and disabled updates, and I have to run a Pipewire script I found in a bug tracker as a workaround and I have to run it every time I boot the machine. I am going to learn more about Pipewire because I think there is a way to set this up permanently. I'd downgrade Pipewire but the older Pipewire version needs a version of libcamera that isn't easily accessible anymore. But everything """works"""!
Maybe by 2025 when Microsoft stops providing free security updates to 10 then wine-staging and Pipewire will get its shit together.
