I kinda wanna try Gentoo just for the experience, but as someone who already uses Arch, I’m worried it will take up more of my time than my current setup already does.

I use Ardour. It looks pretty complicated to use at first glance, but everything you would need is there in one of the four modes in the top right corner.

I’ve tried Reaper for the plugins and the generally good reputation, but I couldn’t understand the empty interface whatsoever.

Arch Linux with NVIDIA is definitely not great for newbies, especially for people who can’t keep up with the distro. If left unupdated for too long, your system may break. Even if you update every day, you could break something. You just never win with a rolling release distro like this. My only saving grace is that I run with an AMD gpu and so far, that thing has just worked.

My tip for anyone switching to Linux is to switch to AMD. Even if NVIDIA is better overall for performance and features, even if the last time you tried AMD on your windows system it was slow and a bit buggy, on Linux, AMD just works, without extra steps.

Man i didn’t know the Thunderbird logo turned into reverse Firefox

It depends on what you have installed and what you do with your device. I just so happen to do a ton of stuff and have way too many packages installed. The big difference is that you don’t have to restart with Arch, meaning you might not know when something broke until it loads up the new code later.