I’d love to noodle about with Haiku, MorphOS and such, but being hopelessly hooked on tiling window managers (Niri particularily), I’m just stuck on unixes…

Not the greatest; they need time to mature, so often the versions from a couple of years back are more palatable.

If you go with Arch, just sudo pacman -S pro-audio realtime-privileges ; sudo usermod -aG realtime your-user and get rocking (installs everything).