They've played us for absolute fools.

Awesome I'll check it out.

See my comment above. Bitwig could be okay but it's limited by the rest of the plugin ecosystem being mac and windows only.

Yes, I understand pipewire and jack. The quality of the open source tools around the actual production is bad. Like really bad. Most VSTs (plug-in synths and effects) are windows or mac only too. 99.9% of plugins are naturally prorietary because people wanna be paid for their work in the audio industry. The only acceptable DAW is Bitwig which has a worse licensing scheme than my current DAW (FL studio) and crashed on me every 30min with no way of debugging.

For many reasons I don't wanna get into, DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) on Linux suck. I have a dedicated windows machine for audio production.

No, it does not harm the mechanics at all.