It’s kinda not supposed to happen if your setup is correct.

Most likely reason is too short buffer. And on high CPU load it’s just getting overrun. There are legitimate ways to mitigate it in pipewire. And even manage some rt prio things. Arch wiki and pipewire docs should have comprehensive info on how to properly setup things. It can be bit complicated because different sources can have different quantum values. So some can stutter and some not, but it should be all configurable. Pipewire is very good in that regard, just sad I don’t see any good tools to manage these values w/o creating/editing configs, so people don’t jump into this rabbit hole of research.

Please note that defaults on pipewire should not stutter regularly with proper interface, my main audio interface performs way above what pipewire set by default. But I did used different interfaces and some do struggle with default quantum values.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire I had some stuff on arch not working from the box, and interface selecting wrong type, which added latency as well. I managed to debug most of my stuff using those 2 pages and pipewire documentation. You may not need most of it on another distro. But it’s a good read either way. I changed way too much and long time ago to remember everything though. If everything setup correctly, setting lowest interface supported values for pipewire latency should do the trick (point 3.1.3 on pipewire arch wiki page), without it pipewire will default to the default config option, hence why you probably felt the delay.

Yabridge exist for windows plugins. Surprisingly works pretty good. My arturia pack works w/o any major issues. There is some virtual monitor thingy I do on sway to workaround weird performance bug. But I don’t think it should surface on kde for example.

As for Reaper, DAWs and Linux: Make sure to have low latency setup for pipewire. I had to configure some stuff on arch and add pipewire latency variable with lowest values that my interface can handle to launch option for reaper. I prefer playing and practicing on Linux over the windows in terms of latency now. For how messy pipewire can be, when it’s setup correctly, it’s magnitudes better than windows for low latency audio not just because of latency, but because of current windows audio drivers limitations. I no longer record or edit for quiet some time, so can’t say how it compares to other DAWs. Also why I’m personally using reaper: it’s intuitive, fast, fair price, good terms (perpetual license with updates, there is eol for updates, but it’s focused on specific version release, and for how release cycle goes it can last almost a decade, and you can still use the older versions after update eol, but better read terms yourself), and It has trial period over which I decided that it’s best suited for me.